AMD on Open RAN at MWC25: Great Innovation, Real Deployments, and a Reality Check

At Mobile World Congress 2025, I caught up with Gilles Garcia, Senior Director at AMD, to talk about the company’s long-standing role in driving Open RAN innovation. With over five years of experience working with more than 40 O-RU vendors, AMD is helping drive performance and power efficiency through its RFSoC-based chipsets, combining RF, processing, and programmable logic onto a single platform.

Gilles shared how AMD technology is behind an impressive lineup of Open RAN radios on display at MWC, from small cell to massive MIMO, many of which were developed by vendors recently awarded NTIA grants in the U.S. and deployed in live networks across North America, India, and, maybe most famously, during the 2024 Paris Olympics. 

For AMD, Open RAN represents a strategic and complementary piece of the RAN market, poised to grow as contracts come up for renewal and governments invest in open, secure infrastructure. But despite all of this, Gilles strikes a note of caution regarding the eventual size of the Open RAN opportunity, a view shared by many recent analyst forecasts.