SoftBank & Red Hat’s Energy Solution for Telecommunications
The global telecommunications industry faces mounting pressure to balance the growth of data demands against increasing energy costs and environmental concerns.
Now, as mobile networks evolve towards 5G and 6G technologies, the integration of AI with network infrastructure in data centres presents both opportunities and challenges.
Facing these challenges, SoftBank, a major Japanese telco operator and Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source software solutions, have developed a system to monitor and optimise power consumption in data centres running virtualised Radio Access Networks (vRAN) and AI applications.
The solution has been showcased at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2025 – and integrates with SoftBank's "AITRAS" platform – which is a converged AI-RAN system, using an orchestration tool to allocate computing resources to AI applications based on real-time power usage data.
SoftBank's AI-RAN deployment creates need for power management tools
AITRAS, which stands for AI and Telecom Radio Access System, represents SoftBank's approach to integrating AI capabilities with traditional mobile network infrastructure on a unified computing platform.
- SoftBank and Red Hat developed AITRAS
- The solution leverages Kepler, an open-source project from Red Hat
- Service providers can now achieve greater sustainability and operational flexibility
SoftBank is developing AITRAS as part of its strategy to deploy GPU server-equipped data centres throughout Japan.
The energy requirements of GPUs – that are essential hardware for AI workloads – can be five to ten times higher than traditional computing hardware, creating new challenges for network operators.
Therefore, these new facilities aim to enhance mobile network performance through AI while supporting various AI applications.
However, operating these combined vRAN and AI applications requires substantial electrical power, which comes amid growing pressure to increase renewable energy adoption and reduce carbon emissions.
As a result, the concentration of data centres in Japanese metropolitan areas has created challenges for power grid resilience, driving the need for more distributed energy load management.
These factors prompted SoftBank and Red Hat to create this power optimisation solution, leveraging their joint research and development partnership on AI-RAN technology that began in November 2024.
Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler project enable AITRAS power monitoring
The power monitoring capability derives from the Kepler project, which Red Hat has incorporated into its OpenShift container platform.
Kepler operates within Kubernetes environments, which is an open-source system for automating deployment and management of containerised applications.
The system collects power consumption metrics from servers in each data centre cluster and from individual applications. This energy usage data is then made available to the AITRAS Orchestrator software.
Kepler delivers estimated power consumption information based on GPU utilisation, including resources partitioned using Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows a single physical GPU to be divided into smaller virtual GPU instances.
SoftBank has enhanced its AITRAS Orchestrator by implementing Kepler into the virtualisation infrastructure built on Red Hat OpenShift – enabling the orchestrator to consider power consumption alongside traditional resource allocation factors such as data centre location, application priority and GPU allocation size.
The enhanced AITRAS Orchestrator can monitor power consumption across clusters and assign applications to clusters with lower power usage.
For example, it can optimise resource allocation in ways including:
- In multi-cluster environments – it can monitor power consumption across clusters and assign applications to clusters with lower power usage
- Power consumption limits – can be set for each cluster, ensuring applications are deployed without exceeding the predefined threshold
- Renewable energy availability and carbon intensity metrics – can be set for each cluster, allowing applications to be deployed based on environmental impact considerations
This integration allows mobile network operators to maintain service quality while addressing growing concerns about data centre power consumption, which has become a focus for regulators and environmental groups across major markets.
Ryuji Wakikawa, Vice President and Head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology at SoftBank Corp, says: “Electricity and telecommunications services continue to grow as critical infrastructure that supports society.
“By monitoring and predicting power consumption 'AITRAS' optimises equipment from an energy efficiency perspective while reducing risks through distributed deployment.
“The integration of telecommunications and power infrastructure paves the way for the future of AI-driven infrastructure.”
Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat, adds: “Red Hat and SoftBank are committed to supporting the future of 5G and 6G use cases by bringing the combined power of AI and RAN to network orchestration and optimisation.
“With Red Hat OpenShift as a common platform, AI-RAN offers a pioneering approach to network operations for service providers to harness AI for improved resource efficiency and more sustainable power consumption, as well as supporting AI-enabled workloads across network environments.”
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