Nokia reported stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings as demand from artificial-intelligence and cloud customers accelerated sharply.
Comparable operating profit reached €605 million, up from €448 million a year earlier and comfortably above the approximately €453 million expected by analysts.
Comparable net sales increased approximately 10% to €5.15 billion.
The strongest signal came from AI and cloud infrastructure.
Nokia said sales to AI and cloud customers increased 123% year over year.
Orders from those customers rose 118% to approximately €1.5 billion. (Reuters)
The growth illustrates how the AI infrastructure cycle is expanding beyond semiconductor companies.
Large data centers require increasingly sophisticated optical networking and internet-protocol equipment to move enormous quantities of information between processors, servers and facilities.
Nokia’s Network Infrastructure operation has become increasingly exposed to that investment cycle.
The company maintained its full-year financial outlook following the stronger quarter.
The results provide an important counterpoint to the broader concerns surrounding AI capital spending.
Investors may be questioning whether enormous data-center investments will ultimately generate acceptable returns, but construction of the physical infrastructure supporting those systems continues to generate substantial revenue for networking suppliers.
That distinction matters.
Semiconductor processors perform the computation, but large AI clusters also require high-speed connections capable of moving data among thousands of processors and between data centers.
As AI systems become larger, networking performance increasingly becomes a potential bottleneck.
Nokia’s results indicate that spending to address that problem remains strong.
Markets will now watch whether AI and cloud orders remain elevated and whether Nokia can convert rapidly expanding infrastructure demand into sustained revenue and margin growth.
