Your old phone brands are AI stocks now: Nokia (NOK), BlackBerry (BB), Qualcomm (QCOM)

Picture the phone you carried back in 2005. Maybe a Nokia brick you could drop down the stairs and still use, or a BlackBerry with the little clicky keyboard you typed on under your desk at work. Those brands owned the world, and then the iPhone showed up and flattened most of them. Here is the part that does not get talked about enough: a few of them did not die. They reinvented themselves, and some of the oldest names in cell phones are now genuine AI stocks. Here is who actually pulled it off, what they do today, and where the risk hides, because there is always risk.

Nokia went from ringtones to AI data centers

Nokia (NOK) is the wild one. The company that sold more phones than anyone on earth in the 2000s basically tore itself up and rebuilt around AI at the start of 2026. The headline move: Nvidia (NVDA) put about $1 billion into Nokia, and the two are building something called AI-RAN. In plain terms, RAN is the radio gear that runs cell towers, and the idea is to run that network software on Nvidia's AI chips instead of old-school dedicated hardware. Nokia is betting the future network is basically a giant distributed computer.

That is not the only iron in the fire. Nokia bought Infinera for $2.3 billion to get into optical networking, the high-speed fiber gear that shuttles data between AI data centers, and it has already landed orders from names like OpenAI and CoreWeave (CRWV). Its AI and cloud orders hit around 1 billion euros in a single quarter. The market noticed, and the stock has more than doubled in 2026. We covered one small piece of this, a Pennsylvania chip-packaging expansion that even got a presidential shout-out, in this piece.

The catch: a lot of this is still early, and Nokia is fighting Ericsson and others for the same dollars. The story is real, but the stock has already run a long way on it.

BlackBerry quietly became the software inside your car

If you only remember BlackBerry (BB) for the keyboard, you missed the entire second act. It got out of phones years ago and turned into a software company, and its crown jewel is something called QNX, an operating system that runs safety-critical systems. QNX is now in more than 250 million vehicles, handling things like digital dashboards, driver-assistance, and self-driving features.

Here is why that matters for AI. Self-driving and robotics are what people are starting to call "physical AI," AI that has to act in the real world without crashing, literally. QNX is built for exactly that kind of never-allowed-to-fail computing, and BlackBerry has tied it to Nvidia's robotics chips. It also runs a car-data platform called IVY, built with Amazon (AMZN), and it has folded AI into its cybersecurity tools to spot threats faster.

The numbers are finally turning too. Revenue rose about 26% to $152.9 million in its latest quarter, and the company posted its first positive operating cash flow for a fiscal first quarter in nine years. The stock has been one of 2026's quiet winners, jumping more than 20% on this latest report alone. The catch: this is still a small company with modest revenue, and a turnaround like this has to keep proving itself quarter after quarter.

Qualcomm is the chip from your phone going after Nvidia

Qualcomm (QCOM) is a slightly different flavor of this story. It never made the phones, it made the guts: the modems and Snapdragon chips that give your phone its signal and its brains. That is still a huge business, and it already does a ton of "on-device AI," the kind that runs right on your phone without shipping everything to the cloud.

The bold new move is aimed straight at Nvidia. In late 2025 Qualcomm announced two data-center chips, the AI200 (shipping in 2026) and the AI250 (2027), built for AI inference. Inference just means running a trained AI model to answer your questions, as opposed to training it in the first place. Qualcomm's pitch is cheaper, more power-efficient inference than Nvidia, which today owns something like 80% of that market. If it works, it is a brand-new revenue stream for a company most people still file under "phone chips."

The catch: it is late, Nvidia's lead is enormous, and Qualcomm has not proven itself in the data center yet. This is a show-me bet, not a done deal.

Ericsson is putting AI inside the network itself

Ericsson (ERIC), the Swedish telecom-gear giant that has been around since the rotary-phone era, is chasing the same AI-RAN prize as Nokia but taking the opposite road. Where Nokia is leaning on Nvidia's GPUs, Ericsson is building its AI features to run on its own custom silicon, no Nvidia required, and pitching better energy efficiency. It also teamed up with the AI startup Mistral to build "agentic AI" that helps run networks with less human babysitting.

It helps to know the size of the prize they are all chasing: one research firm pegs the AI-RAN market at more than $200 billion by 2030. The catch with Ericsson is the same as the rest. It is early, and turning a strategy into real profit is the hard part.

The ones that did not make it (and a couple of honorable mentions)

Not every old phone name got a second life. Palm is gone. The Nokia and BlackBerry logos you see on actual phones today are licensed out to other companies (HMD makes the Nokia-branded handsets now), not the businesses we are talking about here. And Motorola, the company that built the very first cell phone, split in two: the phone side lives on under Lenovo and is pushing AI phones, while Motorola Solutions (MSI) reinvented itself around AI for public safety, the video and software that police and emergency services rely on. The lesson is that the brand on the box and the company in your brokerage account are often two very different things, so check what you are actually buying.

So what do you do with this?

Here is my honest read. These are turnaround and reinvention stories, not the flashy triple-digit-growth AI names, and that can be a good thing. Some of them are cheaper and run real, established businesses with actual customers, which is more than you can say for a lot of the AI trade. Nokia and BlackBerry in particular have shown the pivot is producing real orders and, in BlackBerry's case, real cash.

Keep two things in mind, though. First, the AI piece is still small relative to the size of some of these companies, so do not buy them expecting Nvidia-style fireworks. Second, several have already jumped a lot in 2026, which means a good chunk of the good news is already in the price. To see where each of these sits in the bigger picture, our AI stock map lays out every layer of the trade, and if you are wondering whether the whole thing is overheating, we dug into that here.

Bottom line

The phone brands that defined the 2000s mostly got crushed by the smartphone. The few that survived did it by getting out of your pocket and into the plumbing of AI: Nokia into data-center networking, BlackBerry into the software running cars and robots, Qualcomm into AI chips, and Ericsson into smarter networks. It is a genuinely cool comeback story, and in some cases a real business. Just go in knowing these are reinventions with real risk, not sure things, and size them accordingly.

This is research and opinion meant to help you think, not investment advice, and I am not your financial advisor. Figures come from company reports and market coverage as of mid-2026 and can change, so check the latest numbers and do your own homework before buying anything.