Ericsson defends chip strategy as Nvidia plan rattles investors - Light Reading

NVIDIA's rumored plan to develop chips specifically for radio units (RUs) has sparked investor concern at Ericsson, despite the American chipmaker not confirming the initiative. While NVIDIA has previ... Read original →

NVIDIA’s potential entry into radio unit chips would force a fundamental re-architecture of RAN technology stacks. While Ericsson’s ASIC-centric approach offers superior power efficiency, it faces unsustainable economics amid shrinking RAN revenues and soaring 3nm/EUV manufacturing costs. Geopolitical risk compounds this: U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors increasingly target telecom infrastructure, jeopardizing Ericsson’s TSMC-dependent ASIC supply chain. Huawei, with its Ascend and Tiangang co-designed AI-RAN platform, already demonstrates tighter hardware-software integration, while Samsung leverages HBM and advanced packaging to capture O-RAN mindshare. Over the next 18 months, the industry will pivot toward heterogeneous compute with virtualized layers—Ericsson’s multi-CPU software support is a reactive hedge. The decisive battleground lies in defining a scalable, low-power hardware abstraction layer that fuses 6G Massive MIMO with AI-driven RAN intelligence.