Direct:
The AI capital wave is lifting more than the obvious memory winners. It has also pulled two written-off brands back into the conversation, each through a different part of the stack.
Start with the part everyone already knows. Samsung (005930.KS), SK Hynix (000660.KS), and Micron (MU) have ridden AI memory demand to strong earnings and large share-price gains, with HBM and DRAM pricing doing the heavy lifting. That story is settled. The more interesting development is who else the buildout is carrying.
Nokia (NOK) is the clearest case. Nvidia (NVDA) put $1 billion into the company in October 2025, taking a roughly 2.9% stake, to co-develop an AI-RAN platform and push the move from 5G to 6G. The idea is GPU-accelerated base stations that run radio workloads and AI inference on shared infrastructure, with T-Mobile lined up as an early AI-RAN partner. For a vendor that spent the last decade losing ground to Huawei and Ericsson, an Nvidia anchor investment changes how the market reads the company, even if it does not yet prove execution.
BlackBerry (BB) got there through software. Its QNX unit, the embedded real-time operating system buried in cars and industrial controllers, posted record revenue and helped push BlackBerry back to profitability, with company-wide fiscal 2026 revenue guidance around $541 million. Automotive design wins drive most of QNX, but a growing share now comes from outside cars, with the platform turning up in humanoid robot and surgical robotics demonstrations at Embedded World and CES 2026. Safety-certified real-time operating systems are a small field, and QNX sits in it next to Wind River's VxWorks and Green Hills' INTEGRITY, which is a stronger position than BlackBerry held a few years ago.
Neither is a memory story directly, and the connection is indirect. AI-RAN nodes and embedded AI devices add incremental pull on DRAM, NAND, and controllers over time, though no single robot or base station moves the supply picture, and most of that demand lands in segments well away from consumer SSDs.
The turnaround is real but unproven. Nokia still has to ship against Ericsson and the Chinese vendors, and QNX growth rests on automotive cycles that can soften. Both have an opening they have not yet closed.
Drafted with AI assistance against parallel reporting.
Sources:
- DigiTimes, “Commentary: How AI boom gave Nokia and BlackBerry a second life” (June 10, 2026)
- Nokia / Nvidia newsroom, $1 billion investment and AI-RAN 6G partnership (October 2025)
- Nvidia investor relations, AI-RAN and 6G platform press release (October 2025)
- Seeking Alpha, BlackBerry raises fiscal 2026 guidance to $541M on QNX record growth (2026)
- StockTitan / QNX, software-defined vehicle and embedded platform at CES 2026 (January 2026)
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