Nokia: Critical AI Infrastructure In A Telecom Wrapper
Finnish telecom giant Nokia is up 160% in a year, more than doubling in 2026 alone. We found out why Jensen Huang purchased 3% of the company.
When we were boots on the ground at Nvidia GTC, everyone was grabbing their Nebius merch, posing for photos next to Vera Rubin, or gawking at Micron’s latest HBM4 chips.
But we were drawn to a booth not a single person seemed to notice: Nokia.
The maker of indestructible phones beloved by early 2000’s airport Dads and drug dealers alike was a stone’s throw away from Nvidia’s sprawling installation.
We recalled that Nvidia had invested in the company back in October and when Jensen mentioned them by name during the keynote, the stars began to align.
It was utterly fascinating to hear from a Nokia engineer, wide grinned, showing us a live 5G call running through a GPU. He pointed to the Aerial RAN Computer Pro: the physical manifestation of the $1B deal Nvidia announced in October.
The pitch? The same hardware that runs your radio can run AI inference when the network is idle, turning every cell tower in America into a distributed edge data center.
This is why we flagged Nokia as one of our favorite investment ideas of the event in our “Nvidia GTC Deep Dive” at $8 a share.
Our coverage of Nokia even got the attention of the biggest player in our industry, Citrini, who quote tweeted our co-author Kawz.
At $14/share Nokia is considerably more expensive today than it was in March but the stock still looks attractive here.
We finally crunched the numbers in one of the most intensive and comprehensive valuation exercises we’ve ever done. Each part of Nokia’s business, from slow growing mobile infrastructure to their red hot optics business, must be understood and valued independently to comprehend what this business is really worth.
By the end of this report, you’ll understand Nokia’s business, what the upside looks like, and the options contracts were buying to amplify our returns.:
Introduction
Executive Summary
What Infinera Actually Bought Them
Not a Telecom Guy The Hotard Leadership Change
The $1B Nvidia Deal
The Defense Optionality
A Whole New Company The Q1 2026 Print
The Guidance Raise
What Nokia Is Actually Worth: A Three-Scenario Framework
Risks
Positioning + Option Structure
Closing
We’ve been on Substack for just 90 days but were already ranked as the fastest growing finance publication on the platform for a reason. Getting quote tweeted by Citrini for our Nokia research is just another badge of legitimacy.
Our track record speaks for itself. We called photonics before the Substack herd and our two highest-conviction stock picks in that category (SOI and AAOI) tripled between 2/18 and 5/9.
Overall we’ve made 35 calls since launch: 30 winners averaging +55%, 5 losers averaging –13%.
Don’t believe us? Just look at Michael’s transparent performance on copy trading app Autopilot. He is the top trader on the platform by a longshot, outperforming politicians, hedge funds, ex-Citadel traders, AI experts, and even Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The rest of our Nokia report is available to paying subscribers only.
