Analyst(s): Olivier Blanchard
Publication Date: June 23, 2025
Nokia has selected AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC processors to power its Cloud Platform, supporting containerized 5G Core, edge, and enterprise applications. The integration aims to deliver improved compute performance and energy efficiency to address growing network demands. The deployment highlights AMD’s growing role in telecom infrastructure.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Nokia selects 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors to power its Cloud Platform.
- Deployment supports containerized 5G Core, edge, and enterprise applications.
- The partnership enables Nokia to meet customer demands and sustainability goals.
- Collaboration reinforces AMD’s growing presence in telecom infrastructure.
The News: Nokia has chosen 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors to power its Nokia Cloud Platform, expanding their partnership to deliver better performance and improved energy efficiency for virtualization. The platform runs containerized workloads that are key to 5G Core, edge computing, and enterprise applications.
Nokia is aiming for maximum performance per watt to handle rising data demands while keeping energy use and environmental impact balanced. AMD’s EPYC 9005 Series processors promise to help Nokia better address these goals. The move underlines the growing importance of upgrading telecom operators to a scalable but energy-efficient infrastructure ready for the changing demands of 5G networks in the age of AI.
AMD Expands Telecom Role as Nokia Selects EPYC for 5G Cloud Platform
Analyst Take: As telecom companies build out 5G, energy use becomes a bigger concern. Nokia’s choice of AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC processors shows just how important it has become to balance processing power with energy efficiency, not just in AI-dedicated data centers but also across today’s telecom networks. The partnership between Nokia and AMD highlights how advancements in energy efficiency and performance per watt, pushed by the high energy demands of AI training and inference in data centers, can be applied to a broad range of industries and use cases.
A Win-Win for Nokia and AMD
The EPYC 9005 Series’ excellent performance per watt allows Nokia to support heavy workloads with maximum energy efficiency. On the one hand, this helps Nokia meet both the rising demands of its 5G customers and minimize its environmental impact, but on the other, bear in mind that reduced energy cost per workload helps lower operational cost (TCO) for data centers and other processing and traffic centers, which is also good for the bottom line. This is as much an ROI and TCO story as a performance and sustainability story.
For AMD, this partnership points to the telecom industry as a potential onramp for growth, helping the company showcase its products’ versatility and expand its footprint beyond its core data center business. AMD executives have pointed out that telecom operators seek solutions combining high performance, scalability, and energy efficiency as 5G networks get more complex. Working with Nokia gives AMD a stronger presence in this sector, as AMD looks for clear on-ramps for market expansion and revenue.
Stronger Support for Containerized Workloads
Because EPYC processors, especially the 9005 series, are designed to handle compute-intensive tasks common in 5G Core, edge, and enterprise applications, they are uniquely well suited to run containerized workloads, foundational to modern telecom networks’ agility and scalability. Incorporating EPYC 9005 series solutions into their infrastructure should allow Nokia to deploy and manage network and enterprise applications more efficiently. The partnership between both companies also enables Nokia to help AMD develop solutions explicitly tuned for its needs – a capability that may become a more central component of the partnership in coming years.
How Sustainability goals increasingly tie into TCO
While the dual value proposition of improved performance and energy efficiency isn’t unique to the EPYC 9005 series, let alone to AMD, it is becoming a staple value proposition for all data center and IT solutions. As processing and bandwidth demands increase with 1) the continued digitization of business processes, 2) expanding IT infrastructure, and 3) AI model training and inference workloads, so does energy consumption.
This increase in energy consumption, particularly at scale, is entirely at odds with virtually all enterprise, SMB, and government-mandated sustainability goals. This is why most of the focus on performance per watt and energy efficiency tends to touch on how they impact sustainability goals. But with energy costs accounting for anywhere between ⅔ and ¾ of data center spend, the real MVP for organizations when it comes to upgrading to more power-efficient infrastructure solutions is the impact this has on TCO and ROI. As network and processing demands increase, minimizing watts per workload (or per token) is imperative. Energy efficiency, in this context, also means cost efficiency. Nokia’s decision to partner with AMD to bring EPYC 9005 series processors into its network infrastructure and cloud services isn’t just a dual sustainability and performance strategy and a TCO and ROI strategy. This point seems underindexed in most of the coverage surrounding this announcement, and yet seems at the core of AMD’s broad go-to-market strategy, not just limited to Nokia.
What to Watch:
- AMD’s ability to further penetrate telecom infrastructure markets through similar partnerships.
- Nokia’s success in deploying AMD-powered containerized workloads across 5G Core and edge environments.
- Competitor responses as AMD broadens its role in telecom compute infrastructure.
- Customer adoption rates as operators evaluate performance per watt and sustainability benefits.
- Execution risks are tied to the complex integration of new processors into cloud infrastructure.
See the complete press release on AMD’s partnership with Nokia to power 5G cloud infrastructure on the AMD website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Author Information
Research Director Olivier Blanchard covers edge semiconductors and intelligent AI-capable devices for Futurum. In addition to having co-authored several books about digital transformation and AI with Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman, Blanchard brings considerable experience demystifying new and emerging technologies, advising clients on how best to future-proof their organizations, and helping maximize the positive impacts of technology disruption while mitigating their potentially negative effects. Follow his extended analysis on X and LinkedIn.
