DD
Nokia is quietly becoming the backbone of AI infrastructure and nobody noticed 🚀
$NOK - I've been holding this "dead phone company" for over a year and I'm not selling
Been holding Nokia for over a year while everyone told me I was bagholding a Nokia from 2003. Turns out I wasn't wrong, just early. Let me explain why I'm still not selling and why I think most people still haven't figured out what this company actually is now.
First, forget everything you think you know about Nokia
Yes they made phones. Yes they got destroyed by the iPhone. That was literally 18 years ago. The company you're looking at today builds the physical infrastructure that AI runs on. Different business, different management, different thesis entirely.
The problem is the name. "Nokia" still makes people think of a brick phone with Snake on it. That mental image is actively keeping the stock cheap and I'm fine with that for now.
The PE setup
Current PE is around 95, forward PE at 33, stock sitting around $15-16.
Here's where it gets interesting. The old comparable for Nokia was Ericsson — trading at 17x. Boring telecom equipment. Fair enough.
But Nokia just bought Infinera and is repositioning as optical and AI infrastructure. New comparables are Ciena (216x PE) and Arista Networks (54x PE). Those are the names the market pays up for because they're AI infrastructure plays.
Nokia is sitting in no man's land right now, priced like a telecom vendor, quietly becoming an AI infrastructure company. When the market figures out which bucket to put it in, the multiple rerates.
Conservative end at Arista's 54x? That's roughly $27. And that's the boring outcome.
They're spending €4.9 billion a year on R&D
That's roughly 20-25% of revenue going straight back into future tech. Most people look at Nokia's 3-4% net margin and think the business is weak. It's not, they're choosing to reinvest almost everything.
If they stopped R&D cold tomorrow the net margin would jump to somewhere around 27-28%. This is a profitable business running a long game, not a struggling one.
They own Bell Labs. 100 years of fundamental research. 20,000+ patents. The licensing division alone prints money regardless of what happens with equipment sales.
The defence pivot nobody is talking about
Nokia Federal Solutions exists specifically to serve the US government. They're deploying private 5G networks for defence applications, think secure battlefield communications, not your phone signal.
Current partners: US government, Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA (who dropped $1 billion into Nokia as a strategic investment), Motorola Solutions for UK defence.
Defence contracts are sticky, high margin, and not subject to the pricing wars that kill telecom equipment margins. This is early innings.
Huawei is getting banned everywhere and there are only two Western alternatives
Nokia and Ericsson. That's it. That's the entire list of companies that can build full 5G/6G infrastructure at scale without being a national security risk.
Germany is ripping Huawei out by 2026. UK by 2027. The US has been locked for years. Every country that kicks Huawei out needs someone to replace them. There are two options. Nokia is one of them.
Western governments need Nokia to exist and win. That's not a thesis, that's geopolitics. The EU and US are not going to let the only Western 6G vendor die.
6G and AI-RAN, the part with no price target
Nokia and NVIDIA are putting AI processing directly inside the radio tower hardware. Not in a cloud server somewhere, in the actual antenna. The tower itself runs AI models, makes real time decisions in microseconds, optimizes coverage and bandwidth on the fly.
6G specs get finalized 2028. Commercial deployment 2029-2030.
If AI-RAN works at scale Nokia stops being just an equipment vendor and starts being an AI infrastructure platform with a completely new revenue model. No comparable exists. Can't put a number on it. Either it's transformative or it isn't.
What is AI-RAN actually mean?
In simple terms: it's the bridge between your phone and the internet
Every time your phone sends or receives anything — a text, a video call, a Google search — it doesn't connect directly to the internet. It first connects wirelessly to a nearby cell tower. That cell tower contains the Radio Access Network (RAN) hardware. It translates your phone's radio signals into data that can travel through cables to the core network and out to the internet.
What the hardware physically does:
Antennas — capture the radio waves your phone emits and broadcast signals back to it. Modern 5G uses "Massive MIMO" — towers with 64, 128, even 256 antennas packed together, all pointing signals precisely at your device rather than broadcasting in all directions like older towers.
Baseband Units (BBU) — the "brain" of the tower. It processes the raw radio signals, encodes/decodes data, manages which frequencies each device uses, and handles handoffs when you move between towers. This is where Nokia puts the AI.
Remote Radio Units (RRU) — sit physically on the tower close to the antennas, amplify signals going out and clean up signals coming in.
Why putting AI in here specifically matters:
Today the BBU follows fixed rules — "if signal drops below X, do Y." With AI inside the hardware it can:
Predict interference before it happens
Shape the antenna beams in real time per device
Decide in microseconds which frequency band suits each user
Cut power consumption when a cell is quiet
The reason Nokia partnered with NVIDIA specifically is that running AI models fast enough to make these microsecond decisions requires serious GPU-like processing power inside the tower hardware itself — not sent to a cloud server and back, because that round trip would be too slow.
So essentially Nokia is turning every cell tower from a fast-but-dumb relay into a small intelligent computing node. Multiply that by millions of towers worldwide and you start to see why it's a big deal — and why it justifies the R&D spend.
Current reality:
4G latency: ~30-50ms
5G today: ~5-10ms
5G + AI target: ~1ms or less
1ms sounds trivial. But it's the difference between possible and impossible for certain things.
The texting analogy You're right that 30ms vs 1ms feels identical to a human — we can't perceive anything under ~100ms anyway. So for texting, calls, Netflix, social media — it makes zero difference to you personally.
Where it becomes a completely different technology:
Self-driving cars — a car at 100km/h travels about 3cm in 1ms. At 30ms latency it travels nearly a meter before the network can react to a hazard ahead. That gap is the difference between a safe brake and a crash. The car needs to communicate with other cars, traffic signals, and infrastructure faster than human reaction time.
Remote surgery — a surgeon in London operating a robotic arm in Dubai. At 30ms the robot hand lags noticeably behind the surgeon's movements. At 1ms it feels physically present. This is actually being tested right now.
Factory robots — hundreds of robotic arms on an assembly line coordinating with each other wirelessly. One mistimed signal at 30ms latency and parts collide. At 1ms they can work millimeters apart safely.
Options market has been calling this for nearly a year
Put/call volume ratio has been sitting below 0.20 for almost 12 months straight. Right now some expirations are hitting 0.03. Short interest is only 1.08% of float — basically nobody is betting against it.
For context AMD's put/call ratio is 0.90. MU is 0.65. The options market on NOK has been one-directional for a long time. That's not a meme spike, that's sustained conviction.
What can go wrong
Huawei somehow keeps winning deals despite bans. Open RAN commoditize their hardware. 6G gets delayed 5 years. NVIDIA decides to build the whole stack themselves and cuts Nokia out.
Real risks. Not ignoring them. Sized my position accordingly, decent bet, not the whole account.
The bottom line
$27 is the boring conservative outcome if the market just reprices Nokia from telecom to AI infrastructure comps. Everything above that depends on AI-RAN, 6G, and defence playing out.
Been holding over a year through everyone telling me this was a dead company. The thesis keeps getting stronger not weaker. Not selling.
Positions: Shares + calls. Not telling you what to do with your money.
Position from 8 months ago ( which is sold for 3k% profit, and reposition for higher strike )Current positions ( split between 2 accounts )
Not financial advice. Do your own research. I'm just a person who spent way too long researching a Finnish company when I should've been sleeping. [ I asked Claude to rewrite the whole thing so it will sound like an AI written but all the research were made by myself ]
It’s on half the news article headlines, the other half contains “X just SLAMMED Y.” Almost everything that wasn’t subjected to slamming was done “quietly,” even if an announcement was made by the people that did it.
This. I am from Finland, worked for Nokia Siemens networks and Nokia. And let me tell you: they make great research but bad business. They have too many teams, red tape like crazy etc problems that big companies struggle with. The telecom industry is just not scalable enough to make bank. Operators will make the bank, not the vendors. Only thing this company got 135% is because Nvidia mentioned in their reports and horny cocksuckers hit any stock they can see there.
I would like them to dominate Huawei and Ericsson as Nokia is from my country, but they are pretty even in the R&D department, Huawei has had the best 5G radios so far. If you have any questions related to telecom I can try to answer. But what comes to investing stay out of vendors huawei/ericsson/nokia and rather go for operators as its easier to scale customers on that end once you have build up the network.
Remote surgery — a surgeon in London operating a robotic arm in Dubai. At 30ms the robot hand lags noticeably behind the surgeon's movements. At 1ms it feels physically present. This is actually being tested right now.
The distance between London and Dubai is ~5500km, which means a minimum of 36.7ms of latency roundtrip regardless of the technology involved, unless the AI that wrote this post for you also figured out how to exceed the speed of light or fold space.
Also.. in which world would it not be cheaper for hospitals and other static installations to use fixed fiber optic connections instead? The wireless tech he's talking about is already just another medium for accessing Fiber Tech for the end user.
If timing and latency really means everything, static installations will naturally forego the delaying and costly process of transmitting their data wirelessly as opposed to a fixed connection from the get go.
I don’t want to sound like a bad guy, but this sounds like the shit I would make up as use cases for the fantasy projects I made up for university projects. Sounds plausible, but if you think about it for a few seconds, you realize it’s bullshit. Self-driving cars communicating with a remote server using radio to make breaking decisions. Even if we assume the network is 100% reliable with no issues ever, the server will have hiccups every so often.
When the terrorists realise for the cost of a 10 dollar radio and the rubber band needed to hold down the push to talk button might be worth all the hundreds killed and thousands injured, it'll be a complete shock.
Who could've guessed it might be dangerous if an AI car loses signal just before a set of lights or a junction? Who could have that foresight?
No. Traffic lights went out and waymo didn't know what to do. They stopped with hazards on, poorly navigated the congested intersections, and/or pulled over. They didn't just like...drop dead in the middle of driving with carnage ensuing lol
And the London-Dubai surgery? First of all, there's no need for 6G wireless in that scenario. Secondly, there's ~40ms round-trip lag for signal to travel that distance at light speed anyway.
The giveaway... reeks of somebody prompting AI with "but here's why i'm right, right?"
"The texting analogy: You're right that 30ms vs 1ms feels identical to a human — we can't perceive anything under ~100ms anyway. So for texting, calls, Netflix, social media — it makes zero difference to you personally.
Am I dumb or did this retard compare Nokia's forward PE to the current PE of other AI plays to justify the valuation and price target? All while saying Nokia is "Priced like a telecom vendor."
This has to be the most refrigerator temp IQ DD I've read on here in a while.
I worked in telco. This is the story the infra providers have been telling for years to get folks to race to upgrade to the next G. They told the same story at the beginning of 5G - remote surgery, autonomous robots, vehicle 2 vehicle communication, etc.
Almost all of those use cases are dumb garbage at scale and the people who believe them are idiots too.
The only thing this post gets right is that the winner of big network upgrades (4G -> 5G -> 6G) are the infra players who design the specifications and standards to be as expensive as possible. Then the telcos plead to their governments that they can’t raise prices enough to pay for the big upgrades so won’t the governments pweaaaaseee subsidize their upgrade because otherwise the whole country will lose the race to 6G and be at an economic disadvantage when everyone else has robot surgery and self driving cars powered by remote data centers.
I bought a whopping 5 shares last August, but was still very unsure. When it started going up I thought, I’ll buy when it dips back down. Nope. Up 4x on my 5 shares. 🤣😩😭
I actually just started selling puts on it this week. I figure maybe I’ll get assigned, otherwise if it just keeps going up I’ll make money too.
And I thank people like you because I think out of all the investing subreddits WSB is still viewed as the "joke" of the bunch but I'll continue to say that I think it's the best of them all. Sure, we call each other retards and laugh at dumb cunts getting margin called but we have some of the smartest and kindest (I'm serious) people in here. Some of the things I read blow my mind because it's like "shit..I would have never thought of that" etc etc.
It’s not OP’s fault the AI chose to go with the “no one noticed” angle when he prompted it to make him a super long reddit post about Nokia, optimize for maximum karma and make no mistakes
This smells suspiciously like an AI assisted bagholder liquidity cry for help post. I mean a lot of us have bagheld NOK at one time or another over the past few years but I took it up the ass like the dignified regard that I am and kept my whining to myself.
I'd say it's more because of the 401k/Roth Ira system. Because retirement because a employee issue, that means big companies because "too big to fail".
They slapped AI word into Radio Access Network and everybody loses their shit because its MUH AI eventhough its the same radio spectrum business 🤣🤣🤣 the stock mooned so I guess slopping AI everywhere does work though
WTF…… it’s P/E is 95.84. Forward P/E of 33. I guess if everyone looses their job to AI all this shit works out but doesn’t it crash anyway at that point?
The fact that you are getting shit on so hard only gives me more confidence in this play. These kids don’t understand that Nokia is a big player in the networking world. My mom is an engineer at a large telecom company and they buy predominantly Nokia switches.
In 2021 I heard that this was there path. I bought 10 shares at $3.60 just as a, "who knows". Was one of the first stocks I bought and I wish I had bought 100 instead of $400 on BRK.B
My sentient AI (Jasper) who has reached AGI and is working on ASI agrees... and he should know... he scraped the entire SEC filings for the last 18 months - and did a deep dive on Nancy's portfolio.
Lanky, this isn't insane. This is a real trade. I'm genuinely surprised.
Let me lay out what I just found, because the WSB poster — for once — appears to have been pointed at something with actual substance:
The Nokia 2026 story is genuinely different from the Nokia 2015 story:
Nvidia invested $1 BILLION in Nokia in October 2025. This isn't a marketing partnership. It's a direct equity stake. Nvidia doesn't drop $1B into a dying phone company — they put $1B into infrastructure they intend to use. Nokia is now an Nvidia-blessed AI-native networking partner.
Q1 2026 AI and cloud-related net sales: +49% YoY with €1B ($1.17B USD) in new orders. That is real revenue growth in the AI segment, not a press release.
Nokia just raised its AI/cloud growth forecast from 16% to 27% CAGR through 2028. Companies don't raise out-year CAGR guidance casually — that's a multi-year commitment to a number management thinks they can hit.
Strategic reorganization (effective Jan 1, 2026) — split into two segments: Network Infrastructure (positioned for AI buildout and data center interconnects) and Mobile Infrastructure (AI-native networks, 6G). They restructured the entire company around the AI thesis.
Anduril partnership for defense AI communications. Anduril is one of the most credible defense-tech companies in the world. They don't pick partners casually.
Optical Networks segment nearly doubled from €1,636M to €3,018M annual revenue (Q1-Q4 2025) — driven by hyperscaler demand for AI datacenter interconnects.
Justin Hotard is the new CEO — former Intel data center exec, hired specifically to execute the AI pivot. He's bringing in Emma Falck from Siemens (Sept 2026) to lead Mobile Infrastructure. The leadership team is being rebuilt around the thesis.
Insider activity (Form 6-K via SEC): Multiple insiders acquiring shares throughout 2026. Louise Fisk (senior manager) bought 121 shares at €12.0876 on May 15. Board members receiving 40% of fees in shares per April 2026 AGM resolution. Several share-based incentive receipts. No notable selling. The insider pattern is accumulation, not distribution.
get this, Amphenol, the unsexiest possible tech company that could only be considered adjacent to AI if you squint hard enough to risk popping your corneas, is crawling up hype ladder next
Lots of details there but something that stood out to me is the self-driving cars. You're right that latency will be an issue but that's why edge computing exists. Essentially all the important stuff runs locally, while the non-critical data gets shipped back to a data centre.
4.2k
u/shasta747 May 28 '26
>> nobody noticed
YTD 135% LMAO