Intel joins OCUDU to contribute silicon and cloud-native expertise to accelerate vendor-neutral 5G and 6G RAN deployments.
On 4 August 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 Centralized 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 members of the Premier Membership 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 standardize 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 realizing 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.
