AsianFin -- Helsinki-listed Nokia Oyj shares finished around 20.9% higher to hit their highest close since late January 2016. The stock logged its biggest daily gain since 2013 after the Finnish telecom equipment maker reached an agreement with Nvidia Corp. to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) networking transition.
Credit：Nvidia
Nvidia and Nokia agreed on a strategic partnership to add Nvidia-powered, commercial-grade AI-RAN products to Nokia’s industry-leading radio access network (RAN) portfolio, enabling communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on Nvidia platforms. Nvidia will also invest $1 billion in Nokia at a subscription price of $6.01 per share. The investment would give Nvidia a stake of 2.9% in Nokia.The equity investment is subject to customary closing conditions.
Nvidia is introducing Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC-Pro), a 6G-ready accelerated computing platform that combines connectivity, computing and sensing capabilities, enabling telcoms to move from 5G-Advanced to 6G through software upgrades. Nokia will accelerate the availability of its 5G and 6G RAN software on the Nvidia CUDA platform and embed the ARC-Pro at the heart of the new AI-RAN solution to expand its RAN portfolio.
Nvidia and Nokia are laying the strategic infrastructure and opening up a new high-growth frontier for telecom providers by delivering distributed edge AI inferencing at scale. T-Mobile U.S. will collaborate with Nokia and Nvidia to drive and test AI-RAN technologies as a part of the 6G innovation and development process. Trials are expected to begin in 2026, focused on field validation of performance and efficiency gains for customers.
Dell Technologies is driving innovation in Nokia’s AI-RAN solution with Dell PowerEdge servers. These servers enable no-touch software upgrades and low-touch silicon upgrades, ensuring a smooth evolution from 5G to 5G-Advanced and 6G.
Nvidia in its release said the partnership would drive "massive improvements in performance and efficiency, helping ensure that consumers using generative, agentic and physical AI applications on their devices will have seamless network experiences."
"Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure - the digital nervous system of our economy and security," Nvidia CEO Jensen said in the release. “Built on Nvidia CUDA and AI, AI-RAN will revolutionize telecommunications — a generational platform shift that empowers the United States to regain global leadership in this vital infrastructure technology.”
In a keynote at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) AI conference in Washington D.C., Huang said the deal with Nokia would help make the U.S. the center of the next revolution in 6G. he said some policy decision caused the U.S. lost telecommunications leadership on 5G, and the deal aims to prevent that from happening when it comes to 6G and--more importantly--AI.
“We’re going to reinvent 5G, we’re going to get America into the 6G race and get back into creating technology for telecommunications,” Huang said. “We’re going to start setting standards. We’re going to make American technology what the rest of the world builds on. That’s called ARC.”
"The key thing here is it's American technology delivering the base capability, which is the accelerated computing stack from Nvidia, now purpose-built for mobile," Nokia CEO Justin Hotard told Reuters. He expects the new equipment to start contributing to revenue from 2027 as it goes into commercial deployment, first with 5G, followed by 6G.
