The timing of Nokia’s announcements last week about continuing European reductions and increasing US investments is awkward – and raises questions, perhaps, when considered with parallel EU calls in Germany and France, where it is cutting jobs, for home-made sovereign EU infrastructure.
In sum – what to know:
EU cuts and a US pivot – Nokia notified hundreds of R&D staff in Germany and France of redundancies just days before announcing a major restructure in New York and a $4 billion investment into US R&D and manufacturing.
Geopolitics and sovereignty – notionally, the timing jars with political calls in Berlin and Paris for Europe to reduce reliance on US tech – even as US hyperscalers accelerate eastwards to appease EU sovereignty rules.
Bigger strategic questions – Nokia maintains its line about an “AI supercycle”, but the timing of continuing European reductions and increasing US investments is incongruous, and begs questions about its bigger strategy.
It was a strange week for Nokia, last week. Here’s a timeline, plus some broader market context; maybe there is a way to join the dots, and maybe there isn’t.
Friday, November 14: staff in Germany and France, including a crucial contingent engaged in its intellectual property and standardisation work with ETSI and 3GPP, are informed their roles will go. This includes around 700 people at its office Munich, which is a subway ride from the European Patent Office (EPO). They are pegged for redundancy in two waves, they are informed – 300 in 2026, and the remaining 400 by 2030, which is, nominally, when most of the R&D work for 6G and ‘AI-native networks’ (mobile and fixed / fibre) will be completed. Another 427 roles will go in France – covered in local press as Nokia’s “slow death” in the c700 people at its office Munichountry – split between its offices in Massy in southern Paris (Nokia Bell Labs Paris Saclay) and Lannion in Brittany; both are also major R&D centres for the firm.
Wednesday, November 19: the firm holds its Capital Markets Day (CMD) in New York in the US, and announces a restructure that sees five business units effectively reorganised into just two (Mobile Infrastructure and Network Infrastructure; MI and NI) – in pursuit of an “AI supercycle”. A third group of non-priority ‘portfolio businesses’, which are (collectively) losing money, has also been hived off. These, it later emerges, are up for sale. They include its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) division, which sells private 4G/5G solutions (and contributes RAN sales to its loss-making RAN business, to be newly incorporated with its lucrative core-network software and R&D ‘technologies’ units as part of its new MI setup). Nokia has a leadership position in private ‘campus’ networks via its ECE division.
Following its CMD strategy update, Nokia’s share price (which spiralled way-upwards after a $1 billion investment from Nvidia in late October) slumps by about 15 percent.
Friday November 21: Nokia announces a $4 billion investment in the US. The deal is for R&D, plus manufacturing, it says. The announcement goes out at 4pm CET – while the US market is still open, and while European journalists are generally preparing to sign off for the weekend.
Nokia has been asked for a comment.
Separately, and messing with the chronology, and possibly the narrative…
Thursday November 18: a day before Nokia announces (internally) it is making cuts to its heritage R&D functions in France and Germany, and eight days before it announces (externally) that it is to invest heavily in new R&D functions in the US, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz attend a ‘summit on European digital sovereignty’ in Berlin to make Europe “more reliant on its own technology companies” – and to “wean the bloc off American [tech]”.
As a footnote, we might, of course, note that Nokia’s job-cutting is a long-running saga, already. The firm said last year that it will axe between 9,000 and 14,000 jobs by the end of 2026; the latest rounds, not communicated publicly, look only like delivering on the higher end of its original figure – equivalent to about 16 percent of its total workforce (around 86,000 employees, at the time). As others have reported, Nokia had more than 100,000 staff as recently as 2018.
Nor is Nokia the only one in telecoms that is cutting jobs, of course. US operator Verizon has said it will axe 15,000 staff, the largest single-round reduction in the company’s history; some of those will go in its Verizon Business and 5G Acceleration teams, reckon other reports. Mobile operators, in particular, are shedding jobs. There are plenty of other examples, easily found. Meanwhile, Nokia’s great rival Ericsson, the other aristocrat of European telecoms, said in February last year that it will cut 8,5000 workers, equivalent to around eight percent of its global workforce.
Moreover, Nokia is not the only one going west – if, indeed, that is its ultimate strategy for its mobile networks business. Ericsson is also making significant state-side investments, including $150 million in a manufacturing facility in Lewisville, in Texas. The site, called USA 5G Smart Factory, is squarely pitched at appeasing the US push on home-grown telecoms systems. “Products are Made in the USA,” and compliant with the country’s Build America Buy America Act (BABAA), declares a press note, issued last year. Ericsson’s enterprise wireless team, grown out of its acquisition of US firm Cradlepoint in late 2020, is also mostly US-based.
Nokia has previous, too. It launched a dedicated business unit in the US last year to deliver private cellular, edge computing, and other solutions to the federal government. The new unit, called Nokia Federal Solutions, is “bolstered” by its acquisition of US-based integrator Fenix Group, billed as a private 5G specialist in the defense sector. The sub-plot, again, is about sovereign tech in mission-critical national infrastructure. Ironically, perhaps, the Finnish firm has said to its internal teams, at least, that it is quitting the mission-critical private 5G game – at least so far as integration-heavy campus-style deployments go.
There will be other, probably better, examples of both firm’s US migration.
But another thing, as someone astutely said to RCR Wireless this week: there is an opposite-ways narrative as well, as US cloud hyperscalers go east to appease European sovereignty rules. The rate of appeasement has clearly accelerated over the last few years – showing a shift from traditional ‘EU-hosted regions’ to full sovereign-cloud models with EU-based governance.
In May 2024, AWS announced a €7.8 billion deal to create a ‘European sovereign cloud’, with its first region set to launch in Germany by the end of 2025; by June, it had already established an EU-based corporate structure to operate it. Google opened its first ‘sovereign cloud hub’ in Munich in November (2025), backed by a further €5.5 billion investment to expand its data centre footprint in Germany. Oracle is also expanding its ‘EU sovereign cloud’ with new regions throughout 2025.
So Nokia’s westwards migration might be clearly seen in the context of broader industry pressures and geopolitics. At the same time, its timing looks way off, again, and the mood in the camp, at least in its mainland-European heartlands in Germany and France, is not good, by all accounts. Join the dots, and bigger questions might be asked about its future as a stalwart of European telecoms, perhaps.
