Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia

(cnbc.com)

113 points | by kjhughes 9 hours ago ago

66 comments

  • pavlov 9 hours ago ago

    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.

    • pjmlp 8 hours ago ago

      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.

    • Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago ago

      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.

  • protocolture 4 minutes ago ago

    Diversify before the AI money dries up.

  • dustbunny 9 hours ago ago

    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 8 hours ago ago

      >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 8 hours ago ago

        > 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?

        • JAlexoid an hour ago ago

          We currently have an all American oligopoly on the CPU market - Intel, AMD, Apple(ARM) and Qualcomm(ARM).

          There's hardly any non-American CPU designers out there

        • KK7NIL 8 hours ago ago

          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.

          • tremon 7 hours ago ago

            Or they could be referring to the Wintel monopoly (Windows+Intel), or the x86 duopoly (Intel+AMD), or the FPGA duopoly (Altera=>Intel + Xilinx=>AMD)...

          • whaleofatw2022 5 hours ago ago

            Let's not forget GloFo although they are more interested in bulk at this point.mm

            • KK7NIL 4 hours ago ago

              Global Foundries sent their EUV machine back (and paid a fat restocking fee to do it), they've stopped trying to compete at the leading edge of logic processes.

              SMIC has a DUV multi-patterning 7 nm node which is already economically uncompetitive with EUV 7 nm nodes (except for PRC subsidies) and the economics of DUV only get worse further down, but at least they're trying and will certainly be the first client to use the Chinese EUV machines, whenever those come online.

    • rzerowan 8 hours ago ago

      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.

    • zitterbewegung 9 hours ago ago

      Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.

    • lizardking 9 hours ago ago

      Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?

    • re-thc 9 hours ago ago

      > 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 9 hours ago ago

    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 9 hours ago ago

      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 9 hours ago ago

      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 8 hours ago ago

        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 9 hours ago ago

        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.

        • readthenotes1 2 hours ago ago

          The problem is that companies with large market cap will get more of any subsequent investment because many fund's allocate new money by current market cap.

          If you ever played Risk, or most other games, once the snowball starts, it's hard to stop it.

          Of course, since the market has never been like this before, it's a speculation...

  • sherinjosephroy 9 hours ago ago

    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 7 hours ago ago

      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 7 hours ago ago

    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 4 hours ago ago

      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 6 hours ago ago

      Each of them separately, or all of them together?

      • tverbeure 5 hours ago ago

        If it were separately, they’d be able to buy 499 of S&P 500 companies…

  • f4uCL9dNSnQm 9 hours ago ago

    I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".

    • pavlov 9 hours ago ago

      And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent.

      Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.

  • wnevets 9 hours ago ago

    Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1]

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4

    • echelon 8 hours ago ago

      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 8 hours ago ago

        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 8 hours ago ago

    Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)

  • baal80spam 9 hours ago ago

    ITT: Bubblers in full force!

  • iszomer 8 hours ago ago

    That growing narrative regarding all these AI-centric companies "funding each other" is beginning to look a lot like Attrition.org's (former) sexchart..

  • randomname4325 9 hours ago ago

    Does this signal the a big market for AI processing is at the edge?

  • ngcc_hk 2 hours ago ago

    Given 5g patent mostly h, usa has missed the boat. Somehow has to find its way back or be dominated. Not necessarily can build an empire or even a duopoly… but at least stay in the game like Intel. Understandable from usa point of view.

  • cinntaile 7 hours ago ago

    Why? I don't get what's in it for Nvidia or Nokia?

    AI on IoT devices?

  • mgh2 5 hours ago ago

    What exactly is "AI-RAN"?

  • ChrisArchitect 9 hours ago ago

    Quietly supplying telecom equipment all this time, it really isn't the Nokia most know. Crazy that Nokia is still even a thing. Who noticed that logo had even changed (two years ago in 2023).

    • foobarian 9 hours ago ago

      Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech

  • bgwalter 9 hours ago ago

    Microsoft (Elop and Ballmer) ruined Nokia's cell phone line that led to massive layoffs.

    Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?

    • phatfish 9 hours ago ago

      Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.

      Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.

      • pjmlp 8 hours ago ago

        Yes they did, a few Symbian models used touch, as did original Maemo device that only did wlan initially.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

        • ptx 8 hours ago ago

          All the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.

          • pjmlp 8 hours ago ago

            It is still touch, and yes you could use finger nails as well on those models.

            However you have not read the links, not all models were alike.

            > The Nokia 7710 is a mobile phone developed by Nokia and announced on 2 November 2004.[1] It was the first Nokia device with a touchscreen

      • Geee 7 hours ago ago

        That isn't really true. The N9 was definitely ahead of it's time with a buttonless gesture based UI similar to the modern iPhone.

    • chollida1 8 hours ago ago

      Microsoft did no such thing. Nokia is very directly responsible for its own cell phone failings.

      This line of thought really needs to die.

      The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop.

      If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.

      • pjmlp 8 hours ago ago

        As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.

        Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.

        The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.

      • nsonha 7 hours ago ago

        yes Nokia had years to come up with a better OS and they didn't. Even Samsung failed at this endeavor years later.

    • jampekka 8 hours ago ago

      Nokia's market cap is over $40B, so $1B is not really Microsoft level coup. At least yet.

    • linhns 9 hours ago ago

      Nokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.

      • foobarian 8 hours ago ago

        Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s

    • triceratops 8 hours ago ago

      To be fair Nokia, like Blackberry, was effed the moment iPhone launched. Elop hastened the decline but it was coming regardless.

      • distances 6 hours ago ago

        It wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US).

        Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.

      • Insanity 7 hours ago ago

        It's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.

        • triceratops 7 hours ago ago

          Nokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.

    • rhetocj23 8 hours ago ago

      MSFT accelerated the invetiable.

      There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.

      • tgma 8 hours ago ago

        They may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.

  • klaussilveira 4 hours ago ago

    Finally. NOK to the moon. Now do BB.

  • hypeatei 9 hours ago ago

    The bubble burst is going to be devastating for these smaller companies caught up in the frenzy. I'm staying invested in companies like Alphabet that are taking part in the race but offer more than just AI hopium.