During MWC 2026, ETSI ISG NFV Chairman Yoshihiro Nakajima delivered a keynote titled “ETSI ISG NFV Journey: From Cloud-Native to AI-Native,” outlining the strategic evolution of NFV and the industry’s transition toward AI-Native Telco Cloud.
ETSI ISG NFV Chairman Yoshihiro Nakajima delivered a keynote
NFV as a Foundation for Autonomous Networks
Nakajima stated that the transition to NFV is a fundamental step toward autonomous network and service management. As NFV evolves from cloud-native to AI-Native, a unified framework is essential, incorporating declarative management APIs, GitOps practices, resource- and service-based controllers, and “data-as-code” models. Automation, intelligence, observability, and security will form the backbone of AI-Native operations, enabling end-to-end automation.
Cloud for AI: Redefining Infrastructure Capabilities
Looking ahead, Nakajima introduced the concept of “Cloud for AI,” describing a shift from traditional cloud infrastructure to AI-optimized infrastructure. Key capabilities include xPU pooling and coordinated scheduling across CPU/xPU, storage, and networking resources. Deep integration of compute, network, and storage will accelerate time-to-market.
Unified Framework to Protect Industry Investment
He concluded that the AI-Native telco cloud vision encompasses six priorities: the leap from cloud to AI infrastructure, coexistence of intelligent and general-purpose computing, unified cloud platforms to safeguard investment, peer-to-peer bus architectures for AI parallelism, deep convergence of compute-network-storage, and bus-cascaded SuperPoD designs delivering higher performance and lower cost.
Building on the forward-looking AI-Native Telco Cloud vision, a new ETSI whitepaper on “AI-Native infrastructure, next phase of Telco Cloud evolution” will be officially released on March 27th, 2026 at the ETSI AI-Native Summit in Netherlands. We warmly invite industry partners and stakeholders to join the summit and be part of this important milestone for the AI-Native journey.