Nok Stock has climbed about 140% year-to-date in 2026, turning a company founded as a paper mill in 1865 into one of the market's sharper AI-infrastructure plays. The share price rose from around $6.50 at the start of the year to a 52-week high of $15.78 in May, after Nvidia's $1 billion investment in Nokia in October 2025 helped legitimize the company's pivot toward wireless networks tied to artificial intelligence.
The rally has not been driven by hype alone. Nokia reported 4.5 billion euros in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, up 4% from a year earlier, while comparable operating profit jumped 54% to 281 million euros and earnings per share increased to 0.05 euros from 0.03 euros. The EPS result beat estimates by roughly 31%, and sales to AI and cloud customers surged 49% as Nokia booked 1 billion euros in new cloud orders, mostly for optical networking gear used inside AI data centers.
That is the heart of the stock's move. Nvidia paid $6.01 per share for its Nokia investment and took about a 3% stake, giving the market a clear signal that one of the biggest names in AI saw value in Nokia's shift. The companies are building AI-RAN together, a system that combines AI workloads with wireless network infrastructure, and T-Mobile is the first deployment partner. Nokia said its Optical Networks segment grew 20% in the quarter, while the broader push into cloud and network gear is starting to show up in the numbers.
Justin Hotard said cloud giants are expected to spend more than $700 billion collectively on AI infrastructure, a scale that helps explain why Nokia has been racing to position itself in the supply chain. The company raised its Network Infrastructure growth guidance to 12% to 14% and projected Optical and IP Networks growth of 18% to 20%, while setting full-year operating profit guidance between 2.0 billion euros and 2.5 billion euros. It also lifted capex guidance to as much as 1 billion euros, a sign it is still spending heavily to keep up with demand.
Nokia has tried to back up that strategy with more than just financial targets. In May, it opened an AI Networking Innovation Lab in Sunnyvale, California, with AMD, Lenovo, Supermicro and Keysight as partners. Its AI-RAN platform now has 10 public customers, including Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, SoftBank and NTT Docomo, giving the company a broader base than a one-customer experiment.
The tension for investors is that the stock has already run far ahead of where it began the year, and the business still depends on whether AI spending stays hot and telecom operators keep moving. The next test comes in late July, when Nokia is due to report second-quarter earnings, and later in 2026 when Nvidia and T-Mobile are expected to begin AI-RAN field trials. If those milestones land, the rally can keep its footing; if they slip, Nok Stock will have to rely on a story that is already priced for a lot of good news.
