Nokia Corporation — AI supply-chain exposure

Nokia is a global network infrastructure vendor, supplying optical transport, IP routing, and fixed and mobile networking gear. Its acquisition of Infinera pushed it to the front of data-centre interconnect and long-haul optical networking — the plumbing that moves data between and inside the vast facilities where AI models are trained. As hyperscalers stitch together clusters, they need enormous bandwidth both within a building and across the fibre links joining them, and Nokia now supplies the optics, the subsea capacity, and the photonic components that carry it.

Its structural hook is that AI has revived a layer long treated as commodity telecom. The interconnect sits between raw compute and the wider network, and every additional cluster multiplies the fibre and optical modules needed to keep it fed. That places Nokia deep in the build-out even though AI and cloud remain a modest slice of its overall sales — the exposure is compounding quickly. The model weights it for owning a scarce, physical link, especially long-haul and subsea bandwidth, that only a handful of vendors can supply end to end.