NVIDIA Invests $1 Billion in Nokia

At NVIDIA’s GTC DC show today, CEO Jensen Huang announced a strategic partnership with Nokia that will see NVIDIA spending $1 billion to take a 2.9% share of the mobile technology company while helping Nokia to shift into 6G mode via AI-enabled gear.

In his keynote speech today, Huang said that the world built its telecom infrastructure on American technology, but that over time that’s shifted so that the infra is now “deployed on foreign technologies.” That must stop, he said.

NVIDIA will work with Nokia to “rewrite their stack” of 5G and 6G radio access network (RAN) software via NVIDIA’s CUDA programming platform. NVIDIA will also contribute to Nokia’s existing AirScale base station series an Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC-Pro), a new GPU-enabled reference design that adds connectivity, computing, and sensing capabilities to telco networks.

Streamlining the RAN

“For the first time, we’ll be able to use AI for RAN to make radio communications more spectral-efficient,” Huang said today. That means adjusting beam-forming in real time based on weather and other factors. Since spectral efficiency consumes about 1.5% to 2% of the world’s power, Huang said, use of the new AI-powered base stations will allow for an increase in the amount of data on mobile networks without increasing power.

While NVIDIA’s ARC-Pro is aimed at any telco or equipment provider, NVIDIA is working with Nokia first. The result will be a software-driven, AI-equipped RAN infrastructure capable of being upgraded via software from 5G-Advanced to 6G networking.

T-Mobile has signed on to use the Nokia/NVIDIA solution to power its transition to 6G networking. “[T]his strategic initiative reinforces T-Mobile’s leadership in driving the U.S. wireless industry forward,” stated John Saw, president of technology and chief technology officer at T-Mobile, in the press release. “Beginning in 2026, T-Mobile will conduct field evaluations and testing of advanced AI-RAN technologies to ensure they meet the evolving needs of our customers as we move toward 6G.”

Dell Also Involved

Dell Technologies is also in the mix. Its PowerEdge servers can host the new Nokia AI-RAN solution, providing a way for telcos to shift from a variety of RAN iterations to Nokia’s platform via software. Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, notes in the press release the importance of this approach to enabling 6G at the edge:

“The telecommunications industry owns the most valuable real estate for AI — the edge, where data is created. This AI-RAN collaboration with Nokia and NVIDIA makes that potential real. We’ve built some of the world’s largest AI clusters with 100,000+ GPUs. Now we’re applying that expertise to distribute intelligence across millions of edge nodes. The operators who modernize their infrastructure today won’t just carry AI traffic — they’ll be the distributed AI grid factories that process it at the source, where latency matters and data sovereignty is critical.”

This isn’t the first time the trio of NVIDIA, Nokia, and Dell has appeared on the tech scene. Early this month, the three contributed to a $433 pre-series C SAFE round for neocloud Nscale.

A Boon for Both

NVIDIA’s investment and partnership with Nokia isn’t surprising, given Nokia’s turnaround strategy under new CEO Justin Hotard. The mobility tech provider is clearly on a path toward improving both its mobile and datacenter products, and this deal is clear evidence of that. In his remarks at GTC today, CEO Huang thanked Hotard “for helping to bring telecommunication technology back to America.”

For its part, NVIDIA’s investment and technology deal with Nokia adds to a string of recent moves, which include the circular deal pledging $100 billion to help OpenAI build datacenters. NVIDIA is bent on forming the best possible partnerships to ensure its ongoing presence in key markets, including mobility, where AI will play a key role applications requiring access devices such as smart phones. Said Nokia CEO Hotard in the press release: “Our partnership with NVIDIA, and their investment in Nokia, will accelerate AI-RAN innovation to put an AI data center into everyone’s pocket.”

Shares of Nokia soared on the news, and as of this writing late in the afternoon had risen 25.75% today.

Futuriom Take: NVIDIA’s investment in and tech partnership with Nokia signal a desire on both sides to ensure key placement in emerging markets enabled by AI. The move speaks to the momentum behind Nokia’s turnaround as well as to NVIDIA’s ambition to stay ahead of market demand.