Nokia (NYSE:NOK) has spent the past year rebuilding its story around AI, and earlier on July 14, it added another data point. The company signed a 5G expansion agreement with Taiwan Mobile to deploy its AirScale portfolio and AI-driven software across the carrier’s network, part of a broader push toward what Nokia calls AI-native mobile infrastructure. The deal lands alongside a wave of insider stock purchases and a deepening Nvidia partnership, all pointing toward the same bet: that AI traffic is about to overwhelm the networks carrying it, and Nokia wants to be the company that fixes that.
Bull Case: A Network Built To Carry AI, Not Just Phone Calls
The Taiwan Mobile agreement is built around four distinct AI applications rather than a single upgrade. Nokia’s AI for Network software, including its Predictive Hardware Analytics service and MantaRay SON self-organizing network tool, automates operations and enables closed-loop network assurance in real time. Separately, next-generation baseband and radio hardware increases capacity and uplink performance specifically to handle AI-driven traffic, while AI-powered energy management helps Taiwan Mobile hit its sustainability targets, and AI-enabled self-healing capabilities strengthen resilience during outages. Taken together, the deployment sets up support for 5G-Advanced features like network slicing and RedCap.
That kind of upgrade is becoming urgent rather than optional. Generative AI traffic is already driving more than twice as much uplink data as ordinary mobile use, according to Aetha Consulting, and total network load could grow by as much as 10x current levels. Nokia has been building toward this since last October, when it began developing sixth-generation RAN technology, and in June it launched the industry’s first commercial AI-RAN platform, offering 20% higher spectral efficiency than existing systems. Management expects that figure to reach 50% next year and 100% by 2028. The 6G equipment market alone is projected to exceed $50 billion by the first half of the 2030s, growing more than 20% annually, a meaningful expansion opportunity for a company that generated roughly $23 billion in revenue last year.
Nokia is not building this alone. Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) committed a $1 billion equity investment at $6.01 per share back in October 2025, and Nokia’s AI-RAN base stations now run on Nvidia GPUs, with Grace CPU Superchips handling higher-layer processing in Cloud RAN deployments. T-Mobile (NASDAQ:TMUS) has agreed to trial the designs starting in 2026. Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) is involved too, supplying PowerEdge servers for the computing backbone, fresh off a quarter where its AI server business grew 757% year over year.
