Research Note

Abstract

by Stéphane Téral and Stelyana Baleva
 
In Latin, invidia means envy and that’s the origin of the name of the company. Nvidia’s rapid rise to a $1 trillion company caught the attention of a huge crowd worldwide, spanning all market segments that use artificial intelligence (AI). The company has been flawlessly surfing the generative AI wave that keeps swelling with no end in sight and now intends to bring its innovation to telecommunications, including the incipient 5G open vRAN field.

That’s great news! It sounds like the open vRAN chipset ecosystem is about to get even more crowded with a new innovative alternative to Intel’s FlexRAN platform that has been dominating this market since the beginning. Case in point: each time you open the hood of a running commercial open vRAN system, chances are you’ll see an “Intel Inside” sticker (see our March 2023 Open vRAN report – open RAN market sizing and forecast). Nvidia is officially joining the race along with AMD, Arm, Marvell, and Qualcomm to challenge Intel.

In its June 8, 2023, briefing, Nvidia presented a compelling and interesting approach to the open vRAN ecosystem. However, this also raises the question of why in the world a $1 trillion company wants to throw money into a tiny yet growing segment of the mature and concentrated RAN market? The other intriguing part of the story is that the presentation was titled “Reinventing 5G Data Centers with Gen AI,” but quickly moved to 5G vRAN as illustrated in Figure 1. This research note connects the dots between 5G data centers and 5G open vRAN.

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