Jim Cramer spent a segment on CNBC’s Mad Money on June 2, 2026 reintroducing investors to a company most stopped thinking about around the launch of the original iPhone. “Take Nokia, a river in Finland that seemed to run dry nearly 20 years ago,” Cramer said. “Back in the pre-smartphone days, Nokia dominated the cellular space. But once Apple and Android came along, people stopped thinking of it as a growth company, and it became more of a history lesson.”
However, the history lesson now has a sequel. Nokia (NYSE:NOK | NOK Price Prediction) is up 157% year to date and 209% over the past twelve months, with retail traders on Reddit calling it “the backbone of AI infrastructure” in a post that pulled 2,092 upvotes on r/wallstreetbets. Cramer is selling the idea that Nokia quietly became a critical vendor in the AI buildout while nobody was looking.
From smartphone casualty to AI radio access
The pivot has two pieces. One is optical networking, which Nokia bulked up on by acquiring Infinera for $2.3 billion, a deal Cramer called “a tremendous buy” that gave Nokia scale in the data center interconnects consuming a growing share of the AI capex cycle. The other is AI-RAN, embedding AI compute directly into wireless networks so inference happens at the cell tower instead of round-tripping to a hyperscaler. “The new Nokia is about the infrastructure that lets data move closer to where it’s needed,” Cramer said. The frame is edge AI for latency-sensitive applications.
Why NVIDIA wrote a billion-dollar check
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) wrote Nokia a check. In October 2025, NVIDIA announced a strategic partnership and invested $1 billion in Nokia at $6.01 per share. With the stock now at roughly $16.85, that position has already returned roughly 170% in about six months, putting it alongside Jensen Huang’s other public infrastructure bets in Intel, CoreWeave, Lumentum, and Coherent. The strategic logic runs both ways: NVIDIA gets a path into the radio access network and a credible 6G partner, and Nokia gets the imprimatur Cramer cares about. “If Jensen Huang loves it, you know what? Good enough for me,” he said.
The numbers that justify the rerating
The fundamentals back the narrative. Nokia’s AI and cloud net sales rose 49% in the first quarter of 2026, with about 1 billion euros in booked orders. Q4 2025 results showed Optical Networks growing 17% in constant currency with a book-to-bill above one, and CEO Justin Hotard described the demand backdrop in terms unthinkable from a Nokia executive a decade ago: “The AI supercycle is accelerating demand for providers of advanced and trusted connectivity. Nokia is uniquely positioned to be a leader in this market.”
Moreover, management is guiding to comparable operating profit of EUR 2.0 billion to EUR 2.5 billion in 2026, with a longer-term EUR 2.7 billion to EUR 3.2 billion target for 2028. Hotard, who ran Intel’s data center and AI group before taking the Nokia job, is collapsing the company into two segments, Network Infrastructure and Mobile Infrastructure, the kind of structural simplification activists usually have to fight for.
The Cramer caveat
Cramer did not bang the table. “If you’re willing to do the homework and stay on top of this one, you’ve got my blessing to put a small position in Nokia,” he said, before adding: “You might want to wait for a pullback before you pull the trigger on anything more than just a little bit because we’re beginning to get overbought.”
The stock trades at a P/E of 100x, and the analyst consensus price target sits behind the market price. Mobile Networks is still cyclical, carrier capex is still lumpy, and the AI-RAN commercial ramp does not arrive in volume until late 2027. The Reddit enthusiasm and the NVIDIA logo do not change those mechanics. They mean Nokia finally has a second act worth arguing about.
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