After some years of caution and pilots, US manufacturing giant Cargill has scaled private 5G to 50 sites in just six months with NTT Data and Celona – reframing the technology not as a single-use Industry 4.0 fix, but as foundational connectivity to be stacked, scaled, and standardised across its global operations.
In sum – what to know:
Rapid rollout – Cargill has expanded from 20 US test sites to 50 live private 5G deployments across the US and Europe in just six months, signalling one of the fastest large-scale industrial rollouts in the sector.
Killer cases – The killer app for private 5G is not a single use case but a universal service, like souped-up Wi-Fi just for Industry 4.0: total site connectivity, rapid and robust, to stack use cases on top of.
New leader – Cargill presents a counterpoint to the most progressive industrial 5G users, Airbus and John Deere: still entirely pragmatic in its approach, but arguably more aggressive in its scaled execution.
So, here’s a big and important private 5G story, smack-bang in the sector’s industrial heartlands, which has been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks, but is worth picking up properly – because of its scale, and because RCR has followed its story from the start. US process manufacturing giant Cargill, a $165 billion business with 160,00 employees in 70 countries, has now deployed private 5G at 50 sites, it says. Which might be viewed as a sudden and sizeable leap for a business that came across as somewhat pragmatic in its approach just 18 months ago.
But first, some of the points from this other review: Cargill, which produces food and agricultural products, is working with system integrator NTT Data, supplying a Celona-made system, to deploy private 5G globally across its manufacturing footprint; the relationship between the trio has been ongoing since mid-2025, at least, when they confirmed they were testing Celona’s AerFlex system to connect warehousing in 20 satellite offices – to “streamline manufacturing processes, improve supply chain efficiency, and automate forklifts”, they said.
And so, the first point of order is that NTT Data has, in just six months, scaled the deployment from 20 test sites, all in the US, to 50 fully-fledged commercial deployments, mostly in the US, but now in Europe as well. New sites will go live in 2026, they said; additional regions are also “under consideration”. A press note talks about “transforming operations across its manufacturing and processing facilities”, and a means to enable a “connected workplace strategy” to support the “automation, robotics, and digital operations” – plus, trendy physical AI workloads, as well.
Which all sounds very familiar in the crossover OT context of private 5G and Industry 4.0. “For example, Cargill has deployed Spot the Dog at its Amsterdam facility,” said a press note. Spot the Dog – or just Spot, by Boston Dynamics – is the old poster child for automated robotics, and a new one for physical AI. It has been deployed – roaming alone or hunting in packs – on private 5G in “hazardous or hard to reach areas” at a Dutch factory (or warehouse) for visual inspections, hazard monitoring (“such as equipment overheating”), the story goes.
What is missing from the latest press missives is detail about the spectrum usage in the US and Europe – which, nevertheless, might be sensibly inferred from old interviews with the various parties, and some knowledge about their track records and local regulatory environments. As such, it is entirely likely, albeit unconfirmed, that the US systems use PAL licences (possibly GAA arrangements, here and there) in the CBRS band at 3.55-3.7 GHz, and the European systems use dedicated mid-band spectrum, as available variously in EU member states.
(The Netherlands has allocated local spectrum for private 5G at 3.4-3.45 GHz and 3.75-3.8 GHz, for example; there remains a haphazard EU project to unify the region at 3.8-4.2 GHz – as modelled in the UK, notably.)
There is another use-case scenario, it seems, underpinning the Cargill rollout: the firm is deploying an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform from SAP across its global facilities to support and unify a (better) connected workforce, including on private 5G – for higher reliability and lower latency comms, whether for enterprise apps and operational data on industrial smartphones and tablets, or for “real-time” collaboration between its shop-floor and control-room teams. So that’s the news, as presented; but it doesn’t tell the whole story, more interesting besides.
Because Robert Greiner, director of platform engineering for digital technology at Cargill, appeared at the excellent UPTIME event a couple of weeks ago to say more; plus, his comments in these pages in late 2024 (and a colleague’s in late 2023; both taken from conversations at previous editions of Industrial Wireless Forum) should be considered as well. Let’s start with the historical stuff: Cargill has spoken at some length in RCR previously to present a counter-narrative to well-circulated Wi-Fi swap-out stories from the likes of Airbus and John Deere.
For context, Airbus and John Deere are arguably the most progressive and aggressive proponents of private 5G in the industrial space; both are deploying the technology at some pace, for the same ends, and have said they will replace Wi-Fi entirely in their OT environments in due course. But neither, it turns out, is as aggressive as Cargill – at 50 sites, in six months, and counting. This is despite its previous position, 18 months ago, that is not “ripping all that out” – just to replace paid-for Wi-Fi networks with expensive new private 5G systems.
Here’s what Geriner said, then, in response to the Airbus/Deere logic. “Eighty or 100 percent is way too high for Cargill. Most of our companies have traditional networks; they have fibre already. We’re not ripping all of that out… If you’re talking about a greenfield site, three years from now, then, yes, we might line up with an 80/10/10 strategy – for 5G, Wi-Fi, ethernet. But man, if you’re talking about an existing meat packing or corn milling facility… we’re not walking away from that.” More than this, it told RCR in 2023 that it wouldn’t let 5G anywhere near its OT setups.
At least, not in the short term. Speaking at Industrial Wireless Forum in 2023 (when it was Industrial 5G Forum), Alexis Kydonopoulos, a site director at a Cargill facility in Hamburg – in Germany, the home of Industrie 4.0, and the first European country to liberalise spectrum (3.7-3.8 GHz) for local industrial 5G usage – said: “As a B2B business, in the production of raw materials, we are not employing 5G. The reason is relatively straightforward… From the nature of our manufacturing, it’s a little bit difficult to add value to justify the investment.”
Cargill was, late 2023, in the “very, very primitive steps” of evaluating 5G, he said; its only presence, in a chocolate factory in Germany, was via public mobile networks for private mobile phones. How times have changed, then: early 2026, and 50 sites are using private 5G, with more coming – at real pace, it seems. It is a testament, surely, to the value of the technology, in the end, and also, importantly, to the usability and scalability of Celona’s AerFlex system, and, crucially, to the consultancy and integration work by NTT Data. But at root, it is about Cargill, and about Greiner.
Which is the story he told at UPTIME (February 12), in candid fashion; and it is, on the face of it, a revelation – which splinters the old sales crutch that you need a master application to swing the business case. For Cargill, the inflection point was not a killer robot or a marquee workload, but a philosophical shift – away from hunting perfect ROI-ready pilots towards treating private 5G as foundational industrial infrastructure. The comparison is not with some glittering Industry 4.0 demo, but with Wi-Fi: ubiquitous, expected, and justified in aggregate, not in isolation.
The argument gets a little tangled in chicken-and-egg dynamics. The goal is to stack Industry 4.0 use cases, in the end – as it always has been, as has always been discussed. The difference, according to the Cargill experience, is that enterprises have to think bigger to get to that point – to accept that they will stack. Light it up, and let it roll – is the penny-drop. Accept, as well, that 5G is just a better technology for Industry 4.0 than Wi-Fi – presumably. Which sounds like a leap of faith, probably easier after some years of trial and error, and research and outreach.
Anyway, here’s Greiner, uninterrupted, speaking at UPTIME.
“It’s really been a journey trying to figure out how to get plants connected at Cargill. We’ve tried everything. The 5G journey started about five years ago, when AT&T and Verizon came in with presentations that had one slide that talked about private 5G – and it resonated with me. So that started the journey to get private 5G into Cargill. And a lot of people [now] say, ‘wow, you’re going fast’. And I’m like, ‘well, it took four years to get the first site’. There were lots of ups and downs about what we should do – whether to carve out spectrum or partner [with operators]. And I’m very happy with where we are now. We lit-up our first site in March 2025, and we’ve been going pretty fast.
“A lot of times we fell into that use-case trap. I am not a fan of the use-case [strategy] anymore because we were [always] looking for the perfect one. We had projects start and stop, and vendors throw-about terms like ‘carrier grade’. We had budgets sliced because of [group] spending. There were a variety of things. So I took a step back and thought, well, you don’t install Wi-Fi on a use-case basis. You put it in because people expect it to be there. If you install Wi-Fi on a use-case basis, you get into trouble in the carpeted spaces of corporate America.
“Maybe that was the way when Wi-Fi was first being installed, but not now. And so when we talk about lighting up plant floors [with private 5G now, it is for] connectivity to be there. If we ever use the term use case, it is about stacking use cases. So the connectivity model doesn’t just apply to the first thing we want to do, but for cases three, four, five, six, seven; it’s not just there for a little corner of a factory, where you want AGVs to run around. It is there for the outside cameras and fork-lift trucks, as well – and whatever else. That is where we’ve been successful.
“Now, we still aren’t going to be able to do 1,100 facilities in a year – as much as [Celona and NTT Data] want us to. [Instead] we have to systematically figure out which facilities make sense – and then go into them not just to light up a little area for a little use case. Because you paint yourself into a little corner. And then someone says, ‘but I thought you had that private 5G’; and we respond, ‘yeah, it’s in the corner over there’. ‘But I could put a camera on it’. And the response is: ‘Well, it’s out of reach, so it is not going to work; you’re just going to have to add to the project.”
