14 ms·

Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia

304 points by kjhughes 1y ago

klaussilveira 1y ago
Finally. NOK to the moon. Now do BB.
ngcc_hk 1y 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.
protocolture 1y ago
Diversify before the AI money dries up.
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  AI hardware really is the new oil, this sort of thing reminds me of the saudis.
nrmitchi 1y ago
Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
- stanislavb 1y ago
  Which is not not smart. edit: highlight: "not not". I think it's very smart.
  - byyoung3 1y ago
    you calling nvidia dumb not smart
  - kgc 1y ago
    Why is it not smart?
    - mikestorrent 1y ago
      There were two nots
    - chasil 1y ago
      The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community. Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue. The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings. Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence. RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times. Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.
- dtagames 1y ago
  Perhaps not forever but GPUs for AI is likely to be a very solid and profitable business for a long time. CPUs made plenty of money for their makers in that era.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    AI is a bubble and will pop soon, theres no way even 80% of the spending has yielded the returns they were looking for. Nvidia cards will lower in demand though probably the bubble will be a net gain for nvidia over the preceding 4 or 5 years, though it will take them a while to regain their peak market cap
  - adastra22 1y ago
    AI, while undeniably powerful and transformative, is in the midst of the biggest, most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. And nearly all of that money is ending up, directly or indirectly, in GPU data centers. And NVIDIA is the largest cost (profit maker) there. When that investment firehouse gets turned off, the AI providers will stop building new data centers. Likely for some years. That revenue stream for NVIDIA will go to zero so fast… The unknown, as with any bubble, is timing.
    - chii 1y ago
      > most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. the current "bubble" hasn't surpassed the dot-com boom yet.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        The total aggregate loss of value from top to bottom of the dotcom crash was about $5 trillion. That’s the current market cap of NVIDIA alone, to say nothing of other AI companies. So yeah, it has.
        chii 1y ago
        that number back in 2000 is about $9.7 trillion adjusted for inflation. You can't merely just compare the numbers at that time with a number today. It's meaningless. You have to compare forward earnings to share-price ratios.
- kumarvvr 1y ago
  As it seems now, they are into producing silicon that does massive parallel calculations, and variants on it thereof. To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time. And, they seemed to have amassed enough capital to comfortably pivot to the next great thing that requires similar calculations. I think this is their super power. The next logical step would be to get into CPUs, to become a fully integrated computing solutions provider.
  - super256 1y ago
    Nvidia is already doing that under MGX. They also offer their Grace CPUs on that platform.
  - chemotaxis 1y ago
    > To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time. Sure, but they have a market cap of 5 trillion. It's about 10x that of AMD, which also sells similar silicon (and isn't in any distress). It's more than Apple, Google, and Microsoft - and these companies historically found ways to make more money than the vendors they buy chips from. The problem isn't that Nvidia doesn't have good fundamentals or good products, it's that the market is expecting miracles. In the case of Nvidia, the funny thing is that their high valuations started not with AI, but with cryptocurrencies. Just never really came down - they coasted from a silly hype cycle to a more substantive one. Ten years ago, NVDA wasn't an interesting stock at all.
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      Stock values go up when people buying stocks expect them to go up. Stock values go down when people holding stocks expect them to go down.
      - mnky9800n 1y ago
        Why would you hold a stock if you think it should go down? If you think the stock is valuable but in the near term should go down, why not sell and then buy in increments as it goes down?
- toasted-subs 1y ago
  When an organization reaches a certain level of wealth they become what amounts to as lawyers. Placing money in areas that demonstrate their understanding of the situation even if it may result in potential losses strengthens their brand and reputation.
- gethly 1y ago
  They know their time is running out. CEO has been selling shares like they are going out of business the next monday, but nobody talks about it because market could wake up from the dream and crash the entire market as the AI bubble is the only thing holding up the entire USA economy(yes, not just the markets) right now. https://fintel.io/n/huang-jen-hsun https://fintel.io/n/huang-jen-hsun
  - Podrod 1y ago
    >nobody talks about it https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/19/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sells-shares.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/19/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sell... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jensen-huang-selling-nvidia-stock-again-should-you-do-same https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jensen-huang-selling-nvidia-... https://www.ft.com/content/36f346ad-c649-42ac-a6b6-1a8cc881e0bb https://www.ft.com/content/36f346ad-c649-42ac-a6b6-1a8cc881e... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sells-shares-worth-42-million-under-the-same-rule-that-also-sees-google-and-microsoft-ceos-sell-their-shares/articleshow/124291699.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvi...
  - adammarples 1y ago
    Seems like he's sold 10% ish of his shares in 2025, not really that extreme
    - ambicapter 1y ago
      10% seems pretty high, running out of shares to sell of a company you own over the course of a decade? Definitely seems like you're hedging against a downturn.
      - gethly 1y ago
        Facebook too https://fintel.io/n/zuckerberg-mark https://fintel.io/n/zuckerberg-mark They know the market is going to crash soon-ish.
        1y ago
- mprovost 1y ago
  Yes but they're using this fund to prop up their core business (and share price) by artificially creating demand for their own products. Most of the money that they invest comes back to them when these companies buy GPUs.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Strategic Enablement Yup, give them $1B so they can build out AI DC’s stocked with $1B of Nvidia chips.
    - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
      buy in, let them use your money to buy your product back from you, then if you think they'll actually succeed you make money and if not you can slowly dump that stock back onto the market and end up ahead. you've basically manufactured a customer at that point.
      - reactordev 1y ago
        Exactly, the risk is extremely small. If they fail, there will be others too, which means that WSBro’s can bundle and derivatives their way into at least a neural exit.
    - erikig 1y ago
      More importantly than gaining a client for Nvidia's AI chips, this investment gives the company a solid foothold in a competitor to Broadcom in the wireless, datacenter and networking solutions space. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia eventually scoops up all of Nokia.
      - ksec 1y ago
        > I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia eventually scoops up all of Nokia. That is what I wish would happen as well.
      - nsteel 1y ago
- usrusr 1y ago
  Could this be a strategy to scare away overoptimistic stock buyers? When you have a money printing machine that you don't expect to run forever (but aren't afraid of the future beyond, optimistic that you can still make money, just not that easy), as a publicly traded company you have the problem that eventually all owners who have similar expectations will have sold to more optimistic owners who expect nothing less than the money printing machine running forever. And getting even bigger while at it. When that ownership change has happened, the company does not really have any other option than to die trying. Deliberately diluting the value of the company with ownership in "definitely not a money printing machine!" before that happens could be a way to avoid that death march, a survival strategy.
- boringg 1y ago
  Feels more like they are taking a page of SoftBank vision fund thesis but repacking it for strategic investment.
- zipy124 1y ago
  Except usually sovereign wealth funds are for diversification, so oil rich nations will use their wealth fund to invest in non-oil linked commodities, since then if they're revenue dries up their investments shouldn't. Even better they can invest in this with an inverse correlation to oil such as green energy, so when their oil revenue dries up their investments go up. Nvidia is not diversifying, but investing in it's customers, which are very very linked to it's own performance.
  - nrmitchi 1y ago
    You’re definitely right, but I don’t think the risk here is that the industry goes away, or that there isn’t demand for the same set of products. What I think is likely to go away is Nvidia’s monopoly in the space. When it does, Nvidia will still have pieces of all the major players.
- hopelite 1y ago
  I’m not sure how you mean “… very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever…” is an analogue for a sovereign wealth fund, but there is also the issue of one interpretation of what you said very much providing an avenue for sustainability; that all the GPUs for all the AI systems are all going to burn up and/or become outdated in a mere 3-5 years, prompting repurchases. I’m aware there are some efforts in play to offer alternatives to GPUs and compete with Nvidia, but I don’t see a path for how that actually happens in the near term with Nvidia's market dominance, short of revolutionary technological breakthrough or possibly even anti-trusting Nvidia. I suspect what you mean is the circular business practices that we’ve been seeing, seemingly starting with Nvidia for some reason. Is that the aspect you are comparing to some sovereign wealth funds that through simply massive scale, they are capturing the whole lifetime cycle in some places and domains?
  - nrmitchi 1y ago
    Im saying that Nvidia’s current monopoly isn’t going to last forever. The product space will (very likely) still exist, but in 10 years Nvidia may not be able to get the ~80% margins it currently does (due to competition, technological changes, etc). When that happens, they’ll still have their fingers in all the pies. It’s arguably a much better approach for Nvidia as a company.
- klysm 1y ago
  I guess it’s better than just doing share buybacks?
unit149 1y ago
[dead]
anovikov 1y ago
Circular deals marching on
braebo 1y ago
I can’t wait to raise my kids for their mandatory, AI-designated space labor career at NvidiaGoogleZon Corp after they buy the last remaining business and all of North America while I rent out my excess wetware compute in my sleep through my state-sponsored brain implant to pay for credits for my nutrient slop printer.
kordlessagain 1y ago
Nokia is well positioned to enter the humanoid robot market.
JoeOfTexas 1y ago
Finally, holding my Nokia shares pays off. I was down pretty bad since the meme stock phase.
sherinjosephroy 1y ago
[flagged]
- mrweasel 1y 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.
greatgib 1y 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.
- readthenotes1 1y 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.
  - tverbeure 1y 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 1y 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...
  - basiccalendar74 1y 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.
    - jo909 1y ago
wnevets 1y ago
Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4
- echelon 1y 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.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    The problem comes if any of these companies aren't successful with their AI deployments. NVidia is essentially trying to sell GPUs in exchange for stock, but that means if the stock prices of those companies go down, then Nvidia will have payed $1B for the privilege of giving GPUs away below cost.
  - hypeatei 1y 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)
f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".
- pavlov 1y ago
  And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent. Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.
dustbunny 1y 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?
- re-thc 1y 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.
- zitterbewegung 1y ago
  Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
- lizardking 1y ago
  Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?
  - dustbunny 1y ago
    Yes, sorry
- amoshi 1y 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 1y 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?
bgwalter 1y 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?
- iberator 1y ago
  NOKIA IS NOT PHONE COMPANY. Never have been. They produce ayt of telecom stuff. Nokia was never ruined.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    You are probably trolling, but if you cannot read Wikipedia yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia "In 1998 alone, the company had sales revenue of $20 billion, making $2.6 billion profit. By 2000, Nokia employed over 55,000 people and had a market share of 30% in the mobile phone market, almost twice as large as its nearest competitor, Motorola." The mobile phone business was ruined (perhaps they should have used Android), therefore caution about new foreign influence is warranted.
    - iberator 1y ago
      You don't understand: phones were just small part of their business. They are stull tier 1 teleco stuff provider worldwide (gsm, umts, ltr, 5g, core, rrus and bbus etc.)
- linhns 1y ago
  Nokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.
  - foobarian 1y ago
    Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s
- phatfish 1y ago
hypeatei 1y 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.
baal80spam 1y ago
ITT: Bubblers in full force!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
randomname4325 1y ago
Does this signal the a big market for AI processing is at the edge?
pavlov 1y 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y 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.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere. Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US. I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions
- moralestapia 1y ago
  >Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent That's an amazing trove of IP!
- shrubble 1y ago
  A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.
ChrisArchitect 1y 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 1y ago
  Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech
iszomer 1y 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..
_trampeltier 1y ago
Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)
- nsteel 1y ago
  You mean, a week ago when they announced their better than predicted Q3 earnings...?
cinntaile 1y ago
Why? I don't get what's in it for Nvidia or Nokia? AI on IoT devices?
nasmorn 1y 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 1y 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
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
  - hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    They could buy with stock. They can do this limitless times each time an effective merger. The SP500 could merge into one company, regulation permitting.
    - flakeoil 1y ago
      They can not, as Nvidia owns very little of its own stock. It's the owners of the Nvidia stock who potentially could trade their Nvidia stocks for the other 230 companies stocks. But then they have no Nvidia stocks anymore, on the other hand.
- Theodores 1y ago
  In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion. Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.
mgh2 1y ago
What exactly is "AI-RAN"?
- farco12 1y ago
  It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN). It's a potential 6G architecture.
- lovelearning 1y ago
  The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN). AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links. For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side. That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.
  - donkeyboy 1y ago
    Thank you, the future is awesome!
    - mgh2 1y ago
      So it is still just a concept being developed? It might or might not work?
- jimmySixDOF 1y ago
  AI-RAN is the strategic play here because it's unknown (outside of research lab NDAs ?) what potential real-time physical AI/ML implementation will have on the future of edge processing like organizing the low-layer 6G spectrum contention mechanisms. It's a near certainty that custom AI accelerators are a part of every radio base station in the near future so this is not cash investment but a new product line Joint Venture similar to the Intel story.

304 points by kjhughes 1y ago

Finally. NOK to the moon. Now do BB.

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.

protocolture 1y ago

Diversify before the AI money dries up.

pfannkuchen 1y ago
AI hardware really is the new oil, this sort of thing reminds me of the saudis.

nrmitchi 1y ago

Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.

stanislavb 1y ago
Which is not not smart. edit: highlight: "not not". I think it's very smart.
- byyoung3 1y ago
  you calling nvidia dumb not smart
- kgc 1y ago
  Why is it not smart?
  - mikestorrent 1y ago
    There were two nots
  - chasil 1y ago
    The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community. Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue. The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings. Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence. RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times. Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.
dtagames 1y ago
Perhaps not forever but GPUs for AI is likely to be a very solid and profitable business for a long time. CPUs made plenty of money for their makers in that era.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  AI is a bubble and will pop soon, theres no way even 80% of the spending has yielded the returns they were looking for. Nvidia cards will lower in demand though probably the bubble will be a net gain for nvidia over the preceding 4 or 5 years, though it will take them a while to regain their peak market cap
- adastra22 1y ago
  AI, while undeniably powerful and transformative, is in the midst of the biggest, most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. And nearly all of that money is ending up, directly or indirectly, in GPU data centers. And NVIDIA is the largest cost (profit maker) there. When that investment firehouse gets turned off, the AI providers will stop building new data centers. Likely for some years. That revenue stream for NVIDIA will go to zero so fast… The unknown, as with any bubble, is timing.
  - chii 1y ago
    > most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. the current "bubble" hasn't surpassed the dot-com boom yet.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      The total aggregate loss of value from top to bottom of the dotcom crash was about $5 trillion. That’s the current market cap of NVIDIA alone, to say nothing of other AI companies. So yeah, it has.
      - chii 1y ago
        that number back in 2000 is about $9.7 trillion adjusted for inflation. You can't merely just compare the numbers at that time with a number today. It's meaningless. You have to compare forward earnings to share-price ratios.
kumarvvr 1y ago
As it seems now, they are into producing silicon that does massive parallel calculations, and variants on it thereof. To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time. And, they seemed to have amassed enough capital to comfortably pivot to the next great thing that requires similar calculations. I think this is their super power. The next logical step would be to get into CPUs, to become a fully integrated computing solutions provider.
- super256 1y ago
  Nvidia is already doing that under MGX. They also offer their Grace CPUs on that platform.
- chemotaxis 1y ago
  > To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time. Sure, but they have a market cap of 5 trillion. It's about 10x that of AMD, which also sells similar silicon (and isn't in any distress). It's more than Apple, Google, and Microsoft - and these companies historically found ways to make more money than the vendors they buy chips from. The problem isn't that Nvidia doesn't have good fundamentals or good products, it's that the market is expecting miracles. In the case of Nvidia, the funny thing is that their high valuations started not with AI, but with cryptocurrencies. Just never really came down - they coasted from a silly hype cycle to a more substantive one. Ten years ago, NVDA wasn't an interesting stock at all.
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Stock values go up when people buying stocks expect them to go up. Stock values go down when people holding stocks expect them to go down.
    - mnky9800n 1y ago
      Why would you hold a stock if you think it should go down? If you think the stock is valuable but in the near term should go down, why not sell and then buy in increments as it goes down?
toasted-subs 1y ago
When an organization reaches a certain level of wealth they become what amounts to as lawyers. Placing money in areas that demonstrate their understanding of the situation even if it may result in potential losses strengthens their brand and reputation.
gethly 1y ago
They know their time is running out. CEO has been selling shares like they are going out of business the next monday, but nobody talks about it because market could wake up from the dream and crash the entire market as the AI bubble is the only thing holding up the entire USA economy(yes, not just the markets) right now. https://fintel.io/n/huang-jen-hsun https://fintel.io/n/huang-jen-hsun
- Podrod 1y ago
  >nobody talks about it https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/19/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sells-shares.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/19/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sell... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jensen-huang-selling-nvidia-stock-again-should-you-do-same https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jensen-huang-selling-nvidia-... https://www.ft.com/content/36f346ad-c649-42ac-a6b6-1a8cc881e0bb https://www.ft.com/content/36f346ad-c649-42ac-a6b6-1a8cc881e... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sells-shares-worth-42-million-under-the-same-rule-that-also-sees-google-and-microsoft-ceos-sell-their-shares/articleshow/124291699.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/nvi...
- adammarples 1y ago
  Seems like he's sold 10% ish of his shares in 2025, not really that extreme
  - ambicapter 1y ago
    10% seems pretty high, running out of shares to sell of a company you own over the course of a decade? Definitely seems like you're hedging against a downturn.
    - gethly 1y ago
      Facebook too https://fintel.io/n/zuckerberg-mark https://fintel.io/n/zuckerberg-mark They know the market is going to crash soon-ish.
      - 1y ago
mprovost 1y ago
Yes but they're using this fund to prop up their core business (and share price) by artificially creating demand for their own products. Most of the money that they invest comes back to them when these companies buy GPUs.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Strategic Enablement Yup, give them $1B so they can build out AI DC’s stocked with $1B of Nvidia chips.
  - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
    buy in, let them use your money to buy your product back from you, then if you think they'll actually succeed you make money and if not you can slowly dump that stock back onto the market and end up ahead. you've basically manufactured a customer at that point.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Exactly, the risk is extremely small. If they fail, there will be others too, which means that WSBro’s can bundle and derivatives their way into at least a neural exit.
  - erikig 1y ago
    More importantly than gaining a client for Nvidia's AI chips, this investment gives the company a solid foothold in a competitor to Broadcom in the wireless, datacenter and networking solutions space. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia eventually scoops up all of Nokia.
    - ksec 1y ago
      > I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia eventually scoops up all of Nokia. That is what I wish would happen as well.
    - nsteel 1y ago
usrusr 1y ago
Could this be a strategy to scare away overoptimistic stock buyers? When you have a money printing machine that you don't expect to run forever (but aren't afraid of the future beyond, optimistic that you can still make money, just not that easy), as a publicly traded company you have the problem that eventually all owners who have similar expectations will have sold to more optimistic owners who expect nothing less than the money printing machine running forever. And getting even bigger while at it. When that ownership change has happened, the company does not really have any other option than to die trying. Deliberately diluting the value of the company with ownership in "definitely not a money printing machine!" before that happens could be a way to avoid that death march, a survival strategy.
boringg 1y ago
Feels more like they are taking a page of SoftBank vision fund thesis but repacking it for strategic investment.
zipy124 1y ago
Except usually sovereign wealth funds are for diversification, so oil rich nations will use their wealth fund to invest in non-oil linked commodities, since then if they're revenue dries up their investments shouldn't. Even better they can invest in this with an inverse correlation to oil such as green energy, so when their oil revenue dries up their investments go up. Nvidia is not diversifying, but investing in it's customers, which are very very linked to it's own performance.
- nrmitchi 1y ago
  You’re definitely right, but I don’t think the risk here is that the industry goes away, or that there isn’t demand for the same set of products. What I think is likely to go away is Nvidia’s monopoly in the space. When it does, Nvidia will still have pieces of all the major players.
hopelite 1y ago
I’m not sure how you mean “… very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever…” is an analogue for a sovereign wealth fund, but there is also the issue of one interpretation of what you said very much providing an avenue for sustainability; that all the GPUs for all the AI systems are all going to burn up and/or become outdated in a mere 3-5 years, prompting repurchases. I’m aware there are some efforts in play to offer alternatives to GPUs and compete with Nvidia, but I don’t see a path for how that actually happens in the near term with Nvidia's market dominance, short of revolutionary technological breakthrough or possibly even anti-trusting Nvidia. I suspect what you mean is the circular business practices that we’ve been seeing, seemingly starting with Nvidia for some reason. Is that the aspect you are comparing to some sovereign wealth funds that through simply massive scale, they are capturing the whole lifetime cycle in some places and domains?
- nrmitchi 1y ago
  Im saying that Nvidia’s current monopoly isn’t going to last forever. The product space will (very likely) still exist, but in 10 years Nvidia may not be able to get the ~80% margins it currently does (due to competition, technological changes, etc). When that happens, they’ll still have their fingers in all the pies. It’s arguably a much better approach for Nvidia as a company.
klysm 1y ago
I guess it’s better than just doing share buybacks?

unit149 1y ago

[dead]

anovikov 1y ago

Circular deals marching on

braebo 1y ago

I can’t wait to raise my kids for their mandatory, AI-designated space labor career at NvidiaGoogleZon Corp after they buy the last remaining business and all of North America while I rent out my excess wetware compute in my sleep through my state-sponsored brain implant to pay for credits for my nutrient slop printer.

kordlessagain 1y ago

Nokia is well positioned to enter the humanoid robot market.

JoeOfTexas 1y ago

Finally, holding my Nokia shares pays off. I was down pretty bad since the meme stock phase.

sherinjosephroy 1y ago

[flagged]

mrweasel 1y 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.

greatgib 1y 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.

readthenotes1 1y 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.
- tverbeure 1y 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 1y 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...
- basiccalendar74 1y 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.
  - jo909 1y ago

wnevets 1y ago

Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4

echelon 1y 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.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  The problem comes if any of these companies aren't successful with their AI deployments. NVidia is essentially trying to sell GPUs in exchange for stock, but that means if the stock prices of those companies go down, then Nvidia will have payed $1B for the privilege of giving GPUs away below cost.
- hypeatei 1y 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)

f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago

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

pavlov 1y ago
And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent. Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.

dustbunny 1y 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?

re-thc 1y 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.
zitterbewegung 1y ago
Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
lizardking 1y ago
Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?
- dustbunny 1y ago
  Yes, sorry
amoshi 1y 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 1y 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?

bgwalter 1y 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?

iberator 1y ago
NOKIA IS NOT PHONE COMPANY. Never have been. They produce ayt of telecom stuff. Nokia was never ruined.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  You are probably trolling, but if you cannot read Wikipedia yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia "In 1998 alone, the company had sales revenue of $20 billion, making $2.6 billion profit. By 2000, Nokia employed over 55,000 people and had a market share of 30% in the mobile phone market, almost twice as large as its nearest competitor, Motorola." The mobile phone business was ruined (perhaps they should have used Android), therefore caution about new foreign influence is warranted.
  - iberator 1y ago
    You don't understand: phones were just small part of their business. They are stull tier 1 teleco stuff provider worldwide (gsm, umts, ltr, 5g, core, rrus and bbus etc.)
linhns 1y ago
Nokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.
- foobarian 1y ago
  Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s
phatfish 1y ago

hypeatei 1y 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.

baal80spam 1y ago

ITT: Bubblers in full force!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

randomname4325 1y ago

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

pavlov 1y 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.

Imustaskforhelp 1y 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.
- nine_k 1y ago
  UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere. Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US. I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions
moralestapia 1y ago
>Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent That's an amazing trove of IP!
shrubble 1y ago
A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.

ChrisArchitect 1y 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 1y ago
Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech

iszomer 1y 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..

_trampeltier 1y ago

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

nsteel 1y ago
You mean, a week ago when they announced their better than predicted Q3 earnings...?

cinntaile 1y ago

Why? I don't get what's in it for Nvidia or Nokia? AI on IoT devices?

nasmorn 1y 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 1y 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
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
- hshdhdhehd 1y ago
  They could buy with stock. They can do this limitless times each time an effective merger. The SP500 could merge into one company, regulation permitting.
  - flakeoil 1y ago
    They can not, as Nvidia owns very little of its own stock. It's the owners of the Nvidia stock who potentially could trade their Nvidia stocks for the other 230 companies stocks. But then they have no Nvidia stocks anymore, on the other hand.
Theodores 1y ago
In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion. Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.

mgh2 1y ago

What exactly is "AI-RAN"?

farco12 1y ago
It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN). It's a potential 6G architecture.
lovelearning 1y ago
The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN). AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links. For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side. That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.
- donkeyboy 1y ago
  Thank you, the future is awesome!
  - mgh2 1y ago
    So it is still just a concept being developed? It might or might not work?
jimmySixDOF 1y ago
AI-RAN is the strategic play here because it's unknown (outside of research lab NDAs ?) what potential real-time physical AI/ML implementation will have on the future of edge processing like organizing the low-layer 6G spectrum contention mechanisms. It's a near certainty that custom AI accelerators are a part of every radio base station in the near future so this is not cash investment but a new product line Joint Venture similar to the Intel story.