Nokia published its second-quarter and half-year 2026 report this morning in Espoo, and the headline numbers confirm the Finnish group’s transformation story: net sales grew 9 per cent year-on-year at constant currency, driven by a 12 per cent jump in Network Infrastructure, while net sales to AI and cloud customers grew 105 per cent — more than doubling in a year as hyperscalers race to wire up data-centre capacity.

Within Network Infrastructure, Optical Networks grew 20 per cent and IP Networks 16 per cent at constant currency. The comparable operating margin rose 70 basis points to 9.0 per cent. The reported picture was less flattering — a negative 1.0 per cent reported operating margin, weighed down by restructuring charges — but Nokia nudged up the floor of its full-year guidance, now expecting comparable operating profit of €2.1–2.6 billion for 2026.

A company reshaping itself around AI traffic

The quarter also carried structural news: Nokia classified its Fixed Wireless Access CPE and Enterprise Campus Edge businesses as discontinued operations, having agreed to sell the Fixed Wireless Access CPE unit to Inseego. The direction of travel is unambiguous — away from consumer-adjacent hardware, toward the optical, IP and data-centre networking layers where AI infrastructure spending is landing.

Mobile Infrastructure — the traditional radio-access business — grew with a stable profit contribution, helped by product mix. But it is the AI and cloud customer segment, up 105 per cent, that is doing the strategic work. Nokia’s bet, sharpened since Intel veteran Justin Hotard took the CEO chair, is that the network layer between AI data centres is a growth market in which it holds top-tier optical and IP technology.

The Portugal engine room

What does a Finnish network giant’s AI pivot have to do with the Portugal–Scandinavia corridor? Quite a lot. Nokia is one of the largest Nordic employers in Portugal, with close to 2,800 people in the country — the bulk of them at its Amadora campus outside Lisbon, one of Nokia’s largest sites worldwide and a global centre for network software development.

In late 2022 the group announced a dedicated 5G and 6G research and development centre at the Amadora campus, adding a hundred engineering positions on top of an operation that had already absorbed a €90 million investment in a skills centre. The software that manages, automates and secures the networks Nokia sells — including to the data-centre customers now growing at triple digits — is to a meaningful degree engineered in Portugal.

That makes Nokia a quiet template for the corridor thesis this publication tracks daily: Nordic technology groups keep concluding that Portuguese engineering talent is deep, loyal and cost-competitive, and keep scaling their Portuguese sites when growth demands it. Vestas’s new Porto engineering centre, Volvo’s coach-assembly work around Porto and a lengthening list of Nordic mid-caps have run versions of the same play — but few at Amadora’s scale.

What to watch next. Whether Nokia’s restructuring programme — the source of the quarter’s reported loss — touches its Portuguese headcount or, as in past cycles, largely spares a site that sits on the right side of the group’s AI-and-optical strategy; the dividend instalment payable August 6; and whether the Amadora campus picks up work from the discontinued units’ wind-down. For now, Q2 reads as good news for the biggest Finnish engineering employer on Portuguese soil.