Nokia announced that its new Nvidia-based hardware products, available from next year, will potentially last customers deep into the 6G era, according to an interview with Mark Atkinson, Nokia's head of RAN. This follows a late 2025 deal involving a $1 billion investment from Nvidia to make its GPUs the foundation of Nokia's future RAN products. Atkinson stated that the latest Nokia hardware based on custom silicon from Marvell Technology "will get them into 6G, but it won't see them long into 6G," and he believes the same is true of rival Ericsson's latest hardware. Ericsson, which remains attached to its own custom silicon, argues that writing code for Nvidia's CUDA software platform could cause "vendor lock-in." Ericsson instead offers "virtual" RAN products based on Intel's CPUs, which it says can run on CPUs from other chipmakers after minimal tweaks. Atkinson noted that Nokia's deal substitutes Nvidia for Marvell in Layer 1, while "Layer 2 plus is agnostic" and can run on x86 or Arm-based chips.