Matt Hicks, President and Chief Executive Officer | Red Hat, Inc.
Matt Hicks, President and Chief Executive Officer | Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, Inc. and SoftBank Corp. have collaborated to implement AI-RAN, an initiative aimed at optimizing power consumption and networking performance using Red Hat OpenShift. This partnership addresses challenges that service providers encounter in RAN implementation, such as balancing user demands with energy costs and managing distributed workloads.
The integration of AI and RAN on the Red Hat OpenShift platform allows service providers to adjust network parameters dynamically, enhancing network operations' agility. SoftBank is developing AITRAS, an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift, which aims to support virtualized RAN and AI-enabled applications, offering greater consistency and flexibility for diverse applications.
Additionally, Red Hat's community-driven technologies like Kepler are being used to help service providers reduce energy costs by capturing power-use metrics from applications more accurately. These metrics can then be used by SoftBank’s AITRAS orchestrator to balance power consumption across various sites effectively.
The collaboration provides benefits such as optimizing the placement of compute- and GPU-intensive workloads according to power consumption metrics, enabling lightweight measurement using extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), and achieving precise GPU energy calculations for Linux processes and Kubernetes pods.
Chris Wright from Red Hat stated that this partnership supports the future of 5G and 6G use cases by integrating AI with RAN for improved resource efficiency. Meanwhile, Ryuji Wakikawa from SoftBank emphasized the importance of monitoring power consumption for infrastructure optimization.
For more details on this initiative, interested parties can visit Red Hat at MWC Barcelona 2025 for a demonstration.
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