Nvidia takes $1 billion stake in Nokia, sending the 5G equipment maker's shares up 18% (www.cnbc.com)

Nvidia announced a $1 billion equity investment in Nokia — via the issuance of more than 166 million new shares — sending the Finnish telecom equipment maker’s stock up roughly 18–20%. The cash will fund Nokia’s AI initiatives and general corporate purposes, and the two companies formalized a strategic partnership to co-develop next-generation 6G cellular technology. Nokia said it will adapt its 5G/6G software to run on Nvidia chips and collaborate with Nvidia on networking technologies optimized for AI; Nvidia will also evaluate incorporating Nokia technology into its AI infrastructure plans. The deal signals a deeper convergence between AI compute vendors and telecom infrastructure providers: adapting radio and core-network software to run on Nvidia accelerators could accelerate AI-native networking, edge inference, and low-latency model-serving across operators. Technically, the partnership implies work on stack integration (software-porting, drivers, possibly DPU/GPU-accelerated packet processing), performance tuning for high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads, and joint R&D on 6G standards. Coming as Nvidia’s CEO headlines a developer conference in Washington, the investment continues Nvidia’s recent pattern of strategic equity stakes in ecosystem partners and could materially reshape how telecom networks are provisioned for large-scale AI services.