Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this call to discuss the investment and strategic partnership that was announced today between Nokia and Nvidia. On the call with me today, we have Justin Hotard, our President and CEO, along with Marco Wirén, our CFO. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements that include risks and uncertainties, and actual results may, therefore, differ materially from the results we currently expect. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We have identified such risks on the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 20F, which is available on our investor relations website, along with the stock exchange release that we published today.
In terms of the agenda for today, Justin and Marco will go through the key messages from the announcement, and then we'll move to a Q&A session. With that, let me hand over to Justin.
Thank you, David. Thank you all for joining us. Today, we announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia to accelerate the development of AI-native networks. Nvidia will also invest USD 1 billion in Nokia, becoming one of our largest shareholders. This partnership marks a turning point for our industry, particularly in telecommunications, because the next leap in telecommunications isn't just about 5G- 6G. It's about a fundamental redesign of network architecture. Let me provide some context. We are at the outset of the AI supercycle, and AI traffic is growing exponentially. In fact, if we just look at ChatGPT, nearly half of their over 800 million weekly users access the service via mobile devices. That means networks are already carrying AI workloads, workloads that are more variable, more uplink intensive. That's the connection from the device to the network, and more computationally demanding than ever before.
The networks of the future must process intelligence, not just move data. That's exactly what AI-RAN will deliver. By unifying AI and radio access workloads on a software-defined, accelerated computing-based infrastructure, we will boost performance, efficiency, and reduce energy consumption while creating a smooth and cost-effective path to 6G. Together, we are accelerating AI-RAN innovation and paving the way to AI-native 6G by combining Nokia's leadership in mobile and network infrastructure with Nvidia's expertise in accelerated computing and full-stack AI. To put it simply, the shift we are leading together is from connecting people to connecting intelligence. If the smartphone put the internet in everyone's pocket, Nokia and Nvidia will put an AI data center there, and into autonomous vehicles, robots, smart glasses, and across the intelligent connected world.
The partnership will enable our AnyRAN software to be AI-centric, integrating Nvidia's Arc Pro platform into our AirScale baseband hardware and into Dell PowerEdge servers, while also expanding collaboration between the companies on AI networking for the data center. AI-RAN will be first available for 5G networks, and we believe this partnership will ensure that we collectively have a leadership position for 6G. In short, it strengthens our ability to deliver networks that learn, evolve, and continuously improve, building networks for AI and deploying AI for networks. T-Mobile US will be one of the first to collaborate with us to drive and test AI-RAN technologies as a part of their innovation and development process as they look ahead to ensure America leads in 6G. 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 its state-of-the-art PowerEdge servers, enabling Cloud RAN and delivering scalable, no-touch evolution from 5G to 5G Advanced and 6G. Together with Nvidia, we're taking the next leap in telecom and building AI-powered connectivity that extends from the data center all the way to the intelligent device. This is the beginning of the AI-native wireless era, and Nokia, together with Nvidia, Dell, and T-Mobile US, is proud to lead it. With that, let me hand over to Marco to briefly comment on the investment.
Thank you, Justin, and hello from my side as well. We have entered into an agreement with Nvidia that will see them make a USD 1 billion equity investment in Nokia at an effective purchase price of USD 6.01 per share, which is equivalent to EUR 5.16 per share. This means that Nvidia will own about 2.9% of Nokia. We intend to use the proceeds from the investment to accelerate Nokia's strategic plans to advance trusted connectivity for the AI supercycle along with other general corporate purposes. With that, let me hand the call back to David for the Q&A session.
Thank you, Justin, and Marco. We will now begin the Q&A session. We would ask that you kindly limit yourself to one question, and we would ask that you keep your questions focused on the announcement that we've made today. Operator, can you please give the instructions and start the Q&A session?
We will now begin the question and answer session. If you are also viewing the video webcast, please remember to mute the audio on your computer before asking your question, as there is a delay. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please limit yourself to one question only. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Jacob Bluestone with BNP. Please go ahead.
Hi, and thank you for taking the questions. Congratulations on the deal. I had a question around the exclusivity of the deal. Is this an exclusive partnership, or can Nvidia sign similar transactions with the likes of Ericsson? Thank you.
Sure. Thank you, Jacob. It's not an exclusive partnership. In fact, I think that's part of what is important, because I think the best partnerships are where we co-innovate and collaborate, but it does not become something where there is a view that we're beholden to each other because of restrictive covenants. I think if you look at most of the partnerships that are successful in technology, they're because there's mutually aligned interest, shared opportunity in the market, complementary technology, and a shared mindset of innovation. That's what we have in this partnership today.
The next question comes from Janardan Menon with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I just was wondering whether you could flesh out the comment you're making about Nvidia incorporating Nokia's data center switching and optical technologies in its future AI infrastructure architecture. Just wondering in what shape and form that can happen. Is that an architecture which has already been announced and defined, or is that something that's to come in the future? Any color you could give there would be great.
Yeah, there was nothing we shared in terms of specifics other than just continued collaboration.
The next question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you for doing the call and taking the question. Presumably, Nvidia would like to see Nokia invest the USD 1 billion in technology. I'm wondering how we should think about the implications on Nokia's operating expenses, as well as wondering if this would essentially create a disincentive for Nokia to continue to buy back its own stock, essentially putting a preference towards R&D or other investment. Thank you.
Yeah, basically, as we shared, we expect to use the proceeds to accelerate our strategic plans to advance trusted connectivity and other general corporate purposes. I think that was the specific language. I'll let Marco comment here in a second as well if he's got anything to add. Philosophically, we're going to set out, as we go to CMD, we'll set out a view on the long-term trajectory of the business and certainly what we expect from an operating financial model for the business. On that side, I think what you should anticipate is there's nothing about this that is implying we're going to shift to the organic investment profile outside of what we're already planning to do. Where I do see opportunity is obviously to continue to invest where I think it's prudent in capital that I think accelerates the return for our shareholders.
That will continue to be the discipline and the North Star, which Marco and I use in line with the capital allocation framework we have. Marco, do you want to provide any additional comments there?
I can just give you the capital allocation framework. We've been very clear on that. We have different steps and priorities on that. The first priority is always organic investments where we believe that we can create more value for the shareholders. The second is selective and bolt-on M&A opportunities where we see those arising. The third one is dividend, which we believe should be stable and over time growing. The fourth is that whenever we cannot find investments in these three first-mentioned areas, we might consider, in the cases where we believe that we have excess cash, that we could do buybacks, just like we have done in the past as well. You've seen that as well.
The next question comes from Sandeep Deshpande with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for letting me on. Could I try to understand what AI for RAN or AI on RAN actually will involve in terms of Nokia making changes to its mobile equipment? In terms of monetization, are you saying that this will happen in 2027 in terms of monetization of this AI-RAN?
Absolutely, Sandeep. If you think about our stack today, we have a solution called AirScale. What we don't always talk about is AirScale is really two things. It's a hardware platform and a software stack that sits on top of it. We call that software stack AnyRAN. With this announcement, we'll be making AnyRAN AI-native. That means a few things. First of all, it means that we will run on an accelerated computing platform, the Nvidia Arc Pro platform that they've announced today. That will provide an alternative for customers. We believe that that's a compelling alternative because we can now use AI to drive performance improvements, spectral efficiency gains potentially, and create new applications and opportunities leveraging AI. In addition, that stack over time can become completely AI-native. Today, it's largely deterministic in terms of its architecture.
This will allow it to use AI in multiple layers in the stack. That's what we believe is the power of this partnership. The other key thing for us is this means that we can start to deliver more value in software because now our customers don't have to necessarily take hardware upgrades or work through a process like they've traditionally had to when we were in an appliance business model, which, of course, is the legacy of all network providers. Now we have a more software-driven model. The other benefit we get is we get to ride Nvidia's product and performance cycle. We start with Blackwell. We go to Rubin. We continue on. That cycle, we believe, is also virtuous because now we're on a more accelerated platform. This gives us a lot of flexibility.
We think for customers, it gives them benefit because now we're talking about a purpose-built hardware. Jensen talked about this as being a new market they're entering into with a new platform. We also see that similarly, that this is a new platform that they can then deploy.
The next question comes from Richard Kramer with Arete Research. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, Justin. Following on from my question on the earnings call about end-to-end versus discrete products, how closely do you intend to align Nokia's go-to-market with Nvidia's, given that they have deep relationships with all the hyperscalers that you're targeting as customers? Do you envision Nvidia can become a channel for Nokia to win larger deals?
Yeah, look, I mean, I think the focus of this right now, and obviously a lot of the discussion today is around mobile networks. Certainly, there's opportunity for collaboration and partnership. That's, again, why, as I said in the comments I made about the structure of the partnership, when you have a shared vision for the future of networks and you have a complementary set of technology stacks, it's quite easy to partner. That collaboration, I fully anticipate, will show up in customers. In fact, you see that in one customer today in the announcement, T-Mobile US, who has supported this announcement. We see this as a very complementary relationship in terms of go-to-market. On the data center side, I won't comment because obviously the focus of the announcement today was really around the mobile network.
The next question comes from Didier Scemama with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to understand one thing. I can totally see why it's great for Nvidia. Are you suggesting that by sort of modernizing telcos' networks using their GPUs, there's going to be a quicker upgrade cycle or replacement cycle of base station? Is that the idea? Related to that, are you going to use the proceeds primarily to buy Nvidia GPUs?
I think we were clear on the proceeds, and I didn't comment on buying Nvidia GPUs. I understand that there's other deals they've announced like that. That's not the structure or construct of this deal. I think I was clear before on the use of proceeds, as was Marco. Regarding the upgrade cycle, I think it's a bit of a different model that emerges, and it's more in line with what we see on cloud and what we see certainly in AI, which is we will continue to be able to improve the software, the application, which is the AnyRAN for AI application stack. Therefore, the continued enhancements in performance will happen. It will be for the operator's choice to determine when they want to upgrade the hardware and what features they want to take advantage of.
A key thing here as we look ahead to 6G is if you think about the networks of today, largely what we're doing is treating every device consistently. There's a little bit around network slicing, applications for public safety, or other priority services. Largely, we assume every device is some variant of a mobile phone. In the future, with all these intelligent connected autonomous devices and these different use cases and applications, we can't just treat the devices as homogeneous. That means we need to think about the network differently. Of course, as I touched on in my comments, the traffic patterns are different. It's no longer just streaming content or streaming rich media down to a device that's the driver of bandwidth.
It's now about integrating location services, upload speeds, uplink performance, and of course, trust, security, availability, and transparency, because for some of these devices, the connectivity is going to be essential for them to carry out their link. That's very important.
The next question comes from Robert Sanders with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Good evening. I mean, we met your main competitor at MWC. They mentioned that AI-RAN can lead to instability, complexity, higher cost. What gives you the confidence that AI-RAN is actually ready for prime time? Are you proposing that basically the baseband is now virtual, or is there a future for hardware baseband development? Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, I can't comment on what competitors will say. Our experience is that accelerated computing provides incredibly reliable and stable performance. Certainly, the testing and the development work we've been doing today at GTC here in Washington, D.C., we're showing actually a layer three call. For those of you that are more technical, we're actually showing a layer three call happening over this stack that we've developed with a prototype from Nvidia. We're quite confident of its capabilities. I think, again, if you talk a little bit about vRAN or traditionally Cloud RAN, of course, AI-RAN builds on that, right, this virtualization stack.
That's why we felt it was important to both talk about the support, the continuity of support we provide for the AirScale platform so that every existing installed AirScale has an upgrade path with the Nvidia Arc Pro and the option if customers want to go to a more common off-the-shelf server. We've got a robust solution from Dell Technologies with PowerEdge. We think both of those are options depending on the customer and the profile. I think, again, as I said, it's easy to look backwards, but we need to recognize that as an industry, we need to be innovating and looking forward because the applications of tomorrow are very different than the applications that we've been delivering to date.
The next question comes from Felix Henriksen with Nordea. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the deal. I want to ask, where does this transaction sort of stack Nokia in terms of being a preferred data center switching and optical networking partner for Nvidia in terms of the pecking order, given that some of your networking equipment vendor peers also have partnerships with Nvidia? Thanks.
As I said, we just talked about we're going to continue to expand our collaboration on AI networking for the data center. No further comments today on that specifically.
The next question comes from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Yeah, congratulations on the deal. By the sound of this call, I guess plenty of room for sentiment to improve here. I too had a Network Infrastructure question. You mentioned just in the previous answer continuing to expand on your collaboration on AI infrastructure. In that context, can you talk about the nature of that current or past collaboration on the infrastructure side? Maybe in a broader sense, how long this deal has been in the works? Thanks.
Yeah, I think a couple of things. Obviously, we've been working with, you know, what I will share is we've been working with Nvidia for some time. Obviously, you saw the AI-RAN Alliance announcement last year that we were a part of. There's been an active partnership. As I came in and looked at the market, looked at the opportunity, I felt this was an important decision point for us in terms of investing for 6G leadership. From my standpoint, this was an opportunity for us to really lead. I think we also have to remember, you know, we were just talking earlier about one competitor. The competition here is about global technology leadership.
As I've said before, and I've certainly said multiple times publicly, including today, I think winning in technology in the West means doing what you're best at and partnering like crazy for the parts that others are best at and partnering for best in breed. There's no question in my mind Nvidia is the market leader in accelerated computing. As we looked at options to build future AI-ready and AI-native networks in the future in mobile networks, they were the obvious partner. On the data center side, I would say we're not disclosing any details, but we work closely with Nvidia. They're a great partner. You saw that we jointly invested in Nscale, which we announced last quarter. I realize we're leaving you to piece things together a little bit, but that's certainly a part of our portfolio we're very pleased with. We continue to see growth.
We're pleased to support partnerships in that area and continue to build on the broader relationship with Nvidia.
The next question comes from Terence Tsoi with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I just wanted to explore a bit more around the financial opportunity and whether you think the announcements today changed a generally slighted view by industry consultancies of a flattish total RAN market up to the end of the decade, i.e., are we about to see a big boom in AI-RAN to more than offset a decline in non-AI RAN, or is the opportunity more about Nokia potentially winning more market share? Thank you.
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it's probably best to ask the analysts on their perspectives on the market. I think this is a market that needs innovation. It's going to be necessary to have innovation. In fact, if you look at 5G and if you look at where innovation has happened in 5G, here in the U.S., certainly T-Mobile US, our largest customer here, this is a company that has invested in their network, invested in 5G leadership, invested in technology leadership, and their performance in terms of every metric, subscriber growth, profitability, market cap. The results speak for themselves. From my standpoint, there's parts of the industry, certainly that haven't invested in 5G leadership. I think those results speak for themselves.
Again, as we look ahead, I think it's quite easy to look at where we are today and not realize what a tremendous shift is going to happen. As Jensen said, these things can't happen on Wi-Fi, autonomous vehicles, robotics, AR/VR glasses that are with us as we go through our daily lives. All of these applications and use cases need AI-ready networks. That's why I believe that these investments position us, and this partnership positions us for significant success to capitalize on that. By the way, I think it's important for the West. I think it's important for Europe. I think it's important for the U.S. because this kind of innovation in networks is something that has been lacking, just being very objective against our competitors in China.
The next question comes from Emil Immonen with Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Good evening, and thanks for taking my question. I still want to push a little bit on the network side and on data center switching. Could you elaborate a little bit as you mentioned in the announcement that it's worth running Nokia as our Linux software on the Nvidia Spectrum X platform? Is that something that is already being done today, or is this something that you're developing right now?
We haven't talked about that at all in terms of this announcement. What we did announce in earnings was that we're running SR Linux on Supermicro's platforms. I think this is an ecosystem. Back to the principle I touched on earlier, we have, I believe, great technology, robust technology with broad customer adoption in the SR Linux platform. We believe there's differentiation there, and we'll continue to look for partners where we can leverage that innovation and differentiation.
The next question comes from Frederik Lithell with Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. My question is really around the timing. If you could describe a little bit more how we should see this in time. You say you will accelerate your investments with the USD 1 billion. Is this a four to five-year plan before we see actual results, or do you intend to have something earlier than that? Some elaboration on that would be interesting. Thank you.
Absolutely. I think what we shared and what we talked about is that we will, you know, we're demonstrating some early functionality at the show today. We anticipate having field trials in early 2026, in the first half of 2026. Of course, we said by late 2027, we expect to be in commercial production. That will be 5G based, but we believe that's reasonable for the AI-RAN solution that we announced today, both our AnyRAN software and Nvidia's Arc Pro hardware.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. David Mulholland for closing remarks.
Thank you, Betsy. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. I would like to remind you that during the call today, we have made a number of forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may therefore differ materially from the results currently expected. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We have identified such risks in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our investor relations website. Thank you all.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.