The big picture: 6G is still years away from showing up in anyone's phone, but the fight over how it gets built is already underway. One big factor behind it is that it's expected to be far more reliant on AI than 5G ever was. Nvidia, for its part, has a pretty clear answer – it wants those networks running on its chips. And to get there, the company is leaning hard into something the telecom industry has historically wanted nothing to do with: open source.
At this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nvidia announced a "commitment" to make 6G both AI-native and open from the ground up. The list of companies backing this includes major telcos like Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, and SoftBank. But the names that really jump out are Ericsson and Nokia, the two Nordic giants that currently dominate mobile network infrastructure outside of China.
The involvement of that duo comes as a bit of a surprise. As for why, you'd have to look at where 5G ended up first. For all the excitement it generated years ago, it never really delivered a dramatic leap over 4G beyond adding more capacity. It also wasn't designed with AI in mind, which has become a real problem now. And throughout all of this, Ericsson and Nokia have kept a tight grip on the proprietary systems powering those networks. That's made it difficult for smaller companies to break in and innovate on top of them.
So the conversation has now shifted toward actual open-source code. And the US government is now backing that idea through a partnership with the Linux Foundation called OCUDU, which wants to embed open-source software directly into the foundation of 6G networks.
The government's interest isn't purely altruistic here. Washington actually sees open-source as a way to reduce dependency on a handful of foreign vendors for critical communications infrastructure, especially for military use.
As reported by Light Reading, Ronnie Vasishta, who leads Nvidia's telecom work, frames the problem pretty directly. He told the publication that the closed nature of 5G has kept developers and smaller companies from having the flexibility to build on those network platforms.
If 6G were open-sourced, someone with a better algorithm for something like beamforming – a technique used to direct wireless signals more efficiently – could just plug it into the broader stack without needing to be part of some exclusive ecosystem first.
Nvidia already has a proof of concept for this. Its open-source RAN reference platform, called Aerial, has let a company called DeepSig insert an AI-native waveform directly into the stack.
And as pointed out by the publication, this doesn't mean well for Ericsson and Nokia in the long run. That's because both companies make a significant share of their profits by licensing proprietary technology to network operators. So, when that same technology becomes freely available, their core revenue stream starts to erode.
That said, Ranny Haiby, the Linux Foundation's networking CTO, said in the report that he doesn't expect either company to tear up their existing code overnight. He sees something more gradual, like a slow drift toward compatibility as the benefits become harder to ignore.