Intel joins OCUDU to contribute silicon and cloud-native expertise to accelerate vendor-neutral 5G and 6G RAN deployments.
On August 4, 2026, Intel announced its membership in the Open Confidential User Data Utility (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation. Intel is a premier member as a part of the collaborative effort to foster an open, vendor-neutral radio access network (RAN) in centralised unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) software. The initiative aims to reduce the complexity of integration and rapid deployment of production-grade software for 5G and future 6G wireless communications networks.
Other premier members include AMD, AT&T, DeepSig, Ericsson, Nokia, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, SoftBank, Software Radio Systems, and Verizon. Intel will contribute its expertise in semiconductor design and cloud-native networking and telecommunications software. Intel will support the open RAN community to define reference architectures, validate and standardise continuous integration, delivery, and testing (CI/CD/CT), and establish operational best practices for telecommunication companies.
The collaboration with OCUDU marks a major leap towards fully realising open-sourced network software. Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation, stated that Intel’s cloud-native, and hardware-rooted leadership would accelerate the collaborative efforts. Intel will enable telecom operators worldwide to adopt AI-native, open-sourced radio access networks. The involvement will propel the industry from prototype adoption to production-ready implementations and hasten the maturity of the technology landscape.
