AI-RAN Alliance grows to 75 members, unveils pioneering AI-RAN technology demos and AI-RAN Alliance-Endorsed labs
The AI-RAN Alliance has rapidly grown to 75 members, spanning 17 countries across the world. Founded at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, the Alliance unites 43 technology companies, 15 academic institutions, seven service providers, six industry associations, and four labs to accelerate AI-RAN (Artificial Intelligence-Radio Access Networks) development and ecosystem adoption. At MWC Barcelona 2025, the Alliance showcased ten cutting-edge demos that illustrate AI’s transformative impact on wireless networks.
“We are thrilled by the remarkable growth of the AI-RAN Alliance,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chair of the AI-RAN Alliance and Principal Fellow of SoftBank Corp.’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology. “The collective effort of our members — from academia to industry leaders — is driving innovation at an unprecedented pace, enabling AI-RAN to supercharge 5G and O-RAN, while laying the foundation for AI-native 6G networks. At MWC 2025, our real-world demos will showcase how AI-native RAN technologies enhance network efficiency, unlock new revenue streams, and enable groundbreaking new AI services.”
Driving Progress Through a Unified Global Effort
The AI-RAN Alliance distinguishes itself from other industry organizations with its unique focus on innovations and benchmarks. Unlike traditional standards development organizations (SDOs) that prioritize standard-setting, the Alliance offers a trusted framework for validating and testing next-generation of AI-enabled technologies in the wireless domain. On the one hand, it encourages members to bring ideas and concepts without requiring intellectual property disclosures or any licensing terms. On the other hand, the Alliance enables members to contribute data, code and AI/ML algorithms for public use to foster a new age of rapid innovation in the wireless sector. By doing so, it sets a new platform for ideation and collaboration with trusted benchmarking processes to truly transform the future of wireless communication.
The AI-RAN Alliance is advancing practical frameworks, best practices, and reference implementations to enable seamless AI integration into RAN deployments. To facilitate this mission, the AI-RAN Alliance announced its collaboration with Keysight Technologies, Northeastern University, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and VIAVI Solutions to create four, distinct AI-RAN Alliance-endorsed labs, with more labs on the way.
The Alliance’s working groups focus on three key areas:
• AI-for-RAN: Exploring how AI can enhance performance, capabilities and efficiency of radio access networks, such as improving spectral efficiency and energy efficiency.
• AI-and-RAN: Integrating AI and RAN workloads on a common shared infrastructure to maximize utilization and enable new services such as edge AI inferencing.
• AI-on-RAN: Focusing on enabling the RAN to run AI and Gen-AI/LLM/VLMs/agentic AI applications by identifying the necessary network requirements. It benchmarks application performance on 5G and beyond and identifies needs for future networks.
In addition to these working groups, the AI-RAN Alliance is also launching two flagship initiatives:
• Data-for-AI: Focuses on the crucial role of data in AI development and deployment for RANs. This initiative aims to define and implement a structured approach to data management and the data collection pipeline from sources such as real-time systems and simulators, ensuring data availability for AI performance benchmarking and further research.
• Test Methodology: Developing practical testing methodologies to evaluate AI-RAN solutions. This initiative will establish a structured approach to testing and validating AI applications, ensuring alignment with expectations as the industry moves forward with AI-native network evolution.
*Not AI-RAN Alliance members
Above, Alex Jinsung Choi, Chair of the AI-RAN Alliance / image credited to AI-RAN Alliance
