Ericsson teamed up with HPE to establish a joint validation lab for a cloud-native, AI-enabled, dual mode 5G core offering running on multi-vendor infrastructure, aimed at addressing critical challenges faced by telecoms operators.

The lab, located near Ericsson’s headquarters in Sweden, will be operational by the end of the year and will enable customers to conduct testing and provide feedback.

HPE explained in a statement the partnership addresses a growing need to deploy high-performing, scalable and efficient networks while managing the complexity of new services. Essentially, the lab will serve as an environment for interoperability testing, ensuring the dual-mode 5G core solution meets telco requirements.

The integrated solution under development includes Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G core solution, combined with HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers, HPE Juniper Networking high-performance fabric and the Red Hat OpenShift cloud-native telco platform.

Fernando Castro Cristin, VP and general manager, Telco Infrastructure at HPE said the partnership would help to develop an offering providing telcos with the “flexibility to deploy rapidly, scale and demand, adapt to unpredictable traffic, provide predictable lifecycle management, and keep pace with emerging technologies”.

Ericsson Core Networks head of solution and portfolio, Krishna Prasad Kalluri, added that the vendor is committed to “drive innovation and openness, simplifying the journey to cloud-native networks for telco service providers”.

Following initial testing, the focus of the lab in the first half of 2026 will shift to validating the integrated solution to ensure faster-time-market and simplified lifecycle management.