Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia
64 comments
·October 28, 2025pavlov
Imustaskforhelp
Ericsson is swedish Samsung is south korean I can agree that Huawei is chinese so that's a bad choice
But why is Ericsson(swedish), Samsung(south korean) not considered made in US in the sense that atleast south korea has strong relations with america iirc and also I just recently checked and it seems that sweden has also become a part of nato. So some of these can be just as good.
Although I still agree that Nokia might be important in general but I just wanted to point/question it out I suppose.
pjmlp
Unless they bought back Siemens into NSN, I think not.
I was part of the Nokia => NSN transition, and saw that S change back from Siemens into Solutions, with the money they got back from selling Nokia Mobile to Microsoft.
dustbunny
I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
It's like "if your going to sell chips to China, you have to spend some of the money funding non-Chinese tech".
Nokia's capabilities to deliver 5G networks is a direct competitor to Huawei, right?
Is Nvidia functionally an strategic hedge fund of the US Government? Would this fall under Jeffrey Sach's realm?
amoshi
>I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
netdevphoenix
> They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
Mind elaborating? Who are the players in the duopoly?
KK7NIL
Presumably referring to the logic foundry business where TSMC is the monopoly power and Intel, Samsung and SMIC are looking to turn it into a duopoly.
rzerowan
Not a direct competitor, they are at a No3 slot behind Ericsson with a small global footprintmainly concentrated in NorthAmerica and some EU markets. However most of the 5G/5G+ patents are Huawei owned and FRAND so in any case the entiti in the drivers seat is H , thas why even the whole OpenRAN project didnt get far. Most likely like you surmiseits a geo-political hedge play.
addei
Correct if I am wrong, but it is also noted that most essential 5G related patents are held by trio of Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia.
rzerowan
Yep the big three plus Huawei with a bit of an edge on them with te standard essential patent , that they collaborate in a pool with.Although in the matter of mobile modems/radios Qualcomm has an edge over all the others - not so much in the backend/longhaul telco space. Additionally if i recall most of the 6G stuff is being pushed by Huawei since most of it rests on the current 5G/5G+ work.
null
zitterbewegung
Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
re-thc
> I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
If you wanted something in the x86 space it was either Intel or AMD. AMD is a direct competitor. If I was Nvidia I'd have done something about Intel. At least stop them from crashing further.
greatgib
Maybe they got so much money with the AI boom that they don't know anymore what to do with the cash at hand and so starts to invest it in direct now.
stevehawk
they need to ensure future, potential customers and the best way to do that is to own them and tell them to buy your goods.
in five years, NVDA's business strategy will be like CocaCola's, forcing bottlers to buy their syrups.
readthenotes1
I was reading an article earlier today that said passive investing is more than 50% of the market--and since most ETFs allocate by market cap, it causes a reinforcing feedback loop for market cap leaders.
basiccalendar74
Passive investing is not an issue, but the default bias towards large cap equities like SP500, Nasdaq100. Passive investing through total market ETFs (like VTI) maintains the status quo.
For example, if they are only two companies, say with 1T and 4T market cap. If one invests 5M into a total market ETF, 1M is allocated to company A and 4M to company B. But since company B is 4x bigger than company A, the upward price pressure is the same for both companies.
tverbeure
What is the mechanism behind that?
In a hypothetical market with 100% ETFs, you’d have a status quo.
Edit: maybe not, since you have ETFs that invest in, say, Nasdaq only, which is tech oriented and would influence S&P500.
sherinjosephroy
Interesting move. Nvidia’s already owning the AI hardware space, and now teaming with Nokia shows telecoms want a piece of it too. Feels like the next battle is about who controls the data pipes, not just the chips.
mrweasel
I was thinking more that they already own Mellanox, so it makes sense to buy into a networking company. Nokia still makes telecom gear, but they also make switches and routers.
nasmorn
The stock of NVIDIA can buy the 230 smallest S&P 500 companies. Which are still quite big companies. I recently learned this fact and I think it is pretty wild.
bazmattaz
Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
incognito124
Each of them separately, or all of them together?
tverbeure
If it were separately, they’d be able to buy 499 of S&P 500 companies…
f4uCL9dNSnQm
I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".
pavlov
And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent.
Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.
wnevets
Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1]
echelon
This isn't the gotcha everyone in the media thinks it is.
Nvidia is using its revenues to quickly invest in bets that are simultaneously customers.
If anything, it's a triple win.
- taking advantage of cash it needs to deploy
- making new investments in areas NVidia wants to shape
- making new customers that continue to buy Nvidia GPUs, especially if they're successful
Some of these ventures may fail, but it's better than distributing dividends or issuing stock buybacks if you believe this technology will be useful in the future.
Companies doing this purely off of equity, stock valuation, and product/services agreements are even smarter as they're using pure hype to fund strategy.
hypeatei
Cooking your books and calling it a "triple win" is certainly interesting. Nokia just diluted their shares in hopes that AI hype keeps the price pumped up. They do keep the $1B so I guess we'll see what they do with it (other than buying NVDA GPUs, of course)
_trampeltier
Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)
iszomer
That growing narrative regarding all these AI-centric companies "funding each other" is beginning to look a lot like Attrition.org's (former) sexchart..
baal80spam
ITT: Bubblers in full force!
randomname4325
Does this signal the a big market for AI processing is at the edge?
mgh2
What exactly is "AI-RAN"?
Nokia today is the combination of the network businesses of Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent.
They have substantial operations in North America. T-Mobile uses primarily their hardware. Nokia still operates Bell Labs which came originally from AT&T via Lucent.
As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
So they’re more important to US infrastructure than might appear at first glance.