At Mobile World Congress, Nokia showcases its leadership in AI, 5G, and connectivity, emphasizing trusted networks as the foundation of digital transformation. With advancements in cloudification, autonomous networks, and monetization, Nokia is helping businesses optimize and scale their operations. The company’s acquisition of Infinera strengthens its position in optical networks, expanding its influence across all network domains.
Beyond telecom, Nokia is making strides in AI-driven networking, defense applications, and private wireless solutions. The AI-RAN Alliance, co-founded by Nokia, now 70 or so members, highlighting the industry’s embrace of AI-powered networks. In defense, Nokia is leveraging 5G for strategic and tactical military applications. With over 850 private wireless and edge compute customers, Nokia’s innovations continue to deliver strong returns and redefine connectivity.
Steve Saunders:
Nokia has been on something of a roll recently with the timely acquisition of Infinera and a strong presence at the forefront of everything from APIs to AI ran, and data centers to defense. Nokia is positioning itself for a transformative future. While I'm here at MWC 25 to learn about the company's focus and explore the innovations that are driving its resurgence in the telecommunications industry.
Pekka Lundmark:
We have a fantastic presence at Mobile World Congress this year.
Louise Fisk:
We're expecting our customers to do a lot this time around real world impact of technologies like 5G, AI, connectivity, and the critical path that the CSPs bring in delivering on that promise. And then from Nokia's perspective, we'll be helping them differentiate through optimizing networks, through finding new resurgence streams. And we'll also be doing that through things like cloudification, autonomous networks, interoperability, monetization.
Pekka Lundmark:
Connectivity, and not only connectivity, but trusted connectivity underpins all of that. Without trusted connectivity, we will not be able to reap the benefits of AI, cloud or digitalization, in general. We are the only vendor that can be a trusted partner for connectivity in all network domains. Obviously of course we are on a 5G incumbent, but we are much more than that. We are a key player in data centers in switching, in routing. Now through the acquisition of Infinera, we are becoming a very large player in optical networks as well.
David Heard:
The timing of this deal just couldn't be any better. Our team is jacked up. We're very, very stoked to be able to put the R&D that both companies have done separately over the last decade or so together with what can be going forward. Our R&D plan to address some really big markets.
Manish Gulyani:
So for Nokia AI equals massive amounts of compute going into these very, very large data centers. These data centers are getting distributed globally because of the sheer size and power requirements that are being placed on these data centers. And that drives a massive amount of connectivity requirements both inside the data center, between the data centers and to the end users and that's where Nokia comes in. We provide all that you need to meet your networking requirements across all those dimensions.
Ulf Ewaldsson:
We're automating as much as we can when it also comes to creating an even better customer experience. So those would be my AI ran thoughts for the future. Just want to say right off the bat, we're super excited about the AI-RAN Alliance founding members together with SoftBank and a few others and getting together and seeing that there is so much momentum around this because at the end of the day, we live in a standardized industry and we need to be able to drive large ecosystems with what we're doing. And I'm super excited about that.
Aji Ed:
Nokia has been working with the many of our partners and industry players and operators to really demonstrate what we can do with AI-RAN. And when AI-RAN Alliance was launched last year, 12 months ago, Nokia was one of the founding members. And now you can see there are 75 members in this Alliance, which shows that how the industry is embracing this technology. And if you look at any of this, our partner solutions.
Pekka Lundmark:
The other growth area that we have been talking about is defense. It's vital to have trusted actors in this space.
Steve Saunders:
So you're repurposing almost 5G as a solution for military applications. What type of systems will 5G be used in?
Giuseppe Targia:
Actually the beauty of 5G is can be used across the entire military domains from strategic base, forwarding base, to tactical domain because of the power of the technology and the flexibility of the technology itself. So today we're working on what's called a hybrid base version, but we are planning to work and to move more and more to the battlefield.
Pekka Lundmark:
We have currently now over 850 private wireless and edge compute customers and we have seen great use cases where customers have actually had a hundred percent return on investment in just a couple of years after they started to build private network connectivity. So we are big believers in this and we believe that outside of our traditional service provider markets, this will be one of our major growth vectors going forward.
Federico Guillén:
Warren Buffett once said that when the tide goes down, you could see who's been swimming naked. And I would add when the tides come in, again, you can see who's got the best boat and the best crew. And I'm betting that's going to be Nokia.