Cloudera announced it has joined the AI-RAN Alliance, a global consortium committed to integrating AI into telecommunications infrastructure. Cloudera joins a pioneering group of innovative telecommunication providers that has joined forces with data and AI companies all focused on driving the AI-RAN agenda and transforming telecommunication networks into intelligent, revenue-generating platforms with real-time data and AI.
As telecommunication providers race to optimise the cost of network operations through virtualisation and next generation infrastructure and architectures, AI provides a unique opportunity. AI drives better business outcomes through network service efficiency while at the same time opening up significant opportunities for services innovation. The complexity of deploying AI across distributed edge environments is not trivial and telecommunication providers will have to drive strategic enterprise-wide efforts to operationalise AI at scale across the radio access network (RAN) to unlock its full commercial potential.
The AI-RAN Alliance—which counts NVIDIA as a founding member and Dell, SoftBank, T-Mobile, KT and LG U+ as members—was created to solve these issues while driving innovation at the intersection of AI and telecommunications. Together, the AI-RAN Alliance members are standardising the integration of AI into existing and new networks, enabling shared infrastructure for AI optimisation, accelerating the development of edge AI applications, and establishing real-world proof points to help telecommunications deploy AI reliably and profitably.
Cloudera brings a powerful combination of scalable data management, edge-to-AI orchestration, and an open-source-first approach that complements the AI-RAN Alliance’s mission. Cloudera is uniquely positioned to enable telecommunication providers to deploy, manage, and scale AI workloads across hybrid, edge, and on-premises environments.
As the newest member of the AI-RAN Alliance, Cloudera will:
- Participate in the new ‘Data for AI-RAN’ working group, aimed at standardising data orchestration, LLM-driven network automation, and hybrid-enabled MLOps across telecommunications and AI workloads. Cloudera’s involvement will bring data and AI platform expertise to the AI-RAN Alliance, and help align data and AI pipelines with telecom operational needs—unlocking faster innovation and deployment of AI-native use cases.
- Support the AI-RAN Alliance’s three core objectives, including AI-for-RAN, AI-and-RAN, and AI-on-RAN.
- Accelerate real-world AI use cases with AI-RAN Alliance members to pilot and deploy AI applications, such as SLA-driven network availability and real-time anomaly detection. This includes building and validating reference architectures that telecommunications operators can deploy against in live environments, shortening the path from innovation to implementation, and maximising model reusability and collaboration.
- Leverage the Cloudera platform to demonstrate real-time decision-making at the edge, enabling scalable training data preparation/MLOps, and operationalising AI inference at scale while ensuring governance, observability, and edge-to-core orchestration.
“Cloudera is proud to bring its data and AI expertise to the AI-RAN Alliance. The network is the heart of the telecom business, both in driving margin growth and in service transformation, and AI can unlock substantial value across those dimensions,” said Abhas Ricky, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera. “Given our leadership in the domain — having powered data and AI automation strategies for hundreds of telecommunications providers around the world, we now look forward to accelerating innovation alongside fellow AI-RAN Alliance members, and bringing our customers along. Our goal is to help define the data standards, orchestration models, and reference architectures that will power intelligent, adaptive, and AI-native networks of the future.”
“We are proud to collaborate with Cloudera and fellow AI-RAN Alliance members in the ‘Data for AI-RAN’ working group,” said Jemin Chung, VP Network Strategy, KT. “As AI becomes increasingly central to next-generation networks, the ability to harness data securely and at scale will be a key differentiator. Through this initiative, we look forward to defining best practices that enable AI-centric RAN evolution and improve operational intelligence.”
“Cloudera is an incredible addition to the AI-RAN Alliance, which has grown rapidly as demand for improved AI access and success increases across the industry,” said Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, Principal Fellow, SoftBank’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, and
Chair of the AI-RAN Alliance. “The company’s leadership in data and AI, combined with their extensive telecommunications footprint, will play a vital role in advancing our shared vision of intelligent, AI-native networks.”
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