Nokia’s Impact in the Age of AI

Sustainability is an engine for innovation, collaboration, and long-term impact. As AI and digitalization reshape industries, our focus is on helping customers improve efficiency and resilience while reducing environmental impact and creating wider value for people and communities. This includes the role connectivity can play in supporting resilient infrastructure, digital inclusion and economic opportunity. This progress is happening everyday. 

Nokia’s progress, by the numbers

• 27% reduction of total GHG emissions in 2025 (Scopes 1, 2, 3) from 2019 baseline
• 96% renewable energy used in Nokia facilities in 2025
• 66% reduction in supplier emissions in 2025 from 2019 baseline 
• 75% reduction in energy use for FP5 chipset while increasing system throughput by nearly 4x compared to previous generation
• More than 73,000 tons of hardware, components, and materials delivered to customers in 2025. Of this material, 17% — more than 12,500 tons — came from recycled sources
• 829,953 direct beneficiaries reached through Nokia social digitalization projects from 2023-2025

That is why we are launching our People & Planet progress hub. It is not an impact report or performance report. It is simply a hub that recognizes the continued impact - at scale - of Nokia’s technology and operations on its customers, ecosystem and the communities it operates in. By creating more ways to explore how our products, partnerships and innovative practices push sustainability progress forward, we aim to advance toward our own targets while inspiring and enabling our customers and partners to achieve theirs.

Decarbonizing our operations and value chain

To meet our climate targets, we must 1) decarbonize our direct operations and 2) eliminate indirect emissions from across our value chain. With 94% of Nokia’s total GHG emissions resulting from products in use in 2025, we invest heavily in research and development to continuously improve the efficiency of our products and collaborate with our partners and customers on an ongoing basis to develop new more efficient solutions. We are already making significant progress, with operational and value-chain emissions (Scopes 1-3) down 27% from a 2019 baseline.

R&D hub in Oulu demonstrates Nokia’s decarbonization commitments

Looking ahead, our focus includes further energy-efficiency improvements, heating electrification and heat recovery. Nokia’s R&D and manufacturing campus in Oulu, Finland demonstrates this approach in practice. Along with its innovation potential, the state-of-the-art campus is emblematic of Nokia’s commitment to environmental sustainability. Renewable energy is used across the property, and the onsite energy station is one of the world’s largest district heating and cooling plants. Surplus energy and waste heat will be used to heat 20,000 Oulu homes. 

Helping customers manage the demands of the AI era

Developing more efficient products is one part of our impact. We also work with customers and partners in a range of ways to help them manage the demands of the AI era, strengthen resilience and advance their sustainability ambitions.

Nokia’s advanced data center solutions include data center switching, IP routing, and optical networking that provide high-performance connectivity within and between data centers — ensuring reliability and scalability, as well as unmatched efficiency. Among the ways we help customers manage energy use: Nokia's Infinite Capacity Engine – Data Center (ICE-D) intra-data center optical connectivity technology delivers massive power savings of up to 75% per bit compared to previous generations. Aurelis, our PON-based out-of-band management architecture can reduce the number of active switches by up to 90% compared with conventional approaches, deliver power savings of 50% or more, and simplify operational effort by up to 80%.

We are seeing the same focus across our work with customers and partners. For example, we have provided refurbished equipment to Deutsche Telekom to demonstrate how sustainable solutions can move from concept to large-scale customer deployment. At the Telecom Campus Fair 2026, we were named Deutsche Telekom’s Partner of the Year for Sustainability and Circularity.

Elsewhere, E.ON is modernising its communications infrastructure with Nokia as it looks to reduce energy consumption by up to 50% compared with its existing IP and optical infrastructure. Zayo is deploying Nokia's FP5-based IP technology, which consumes 75% less power than its FP4 predecessor while providing nearly four times the throughput. And research with KDDI Research demonstrated up to 40% lower power consumption in 5G base stations at the same throughput levels.

Impact on digital skill building

Our impact extends beyond environmental performance. It also includes how connectivity and digital skills can help people access education, employment, essential services and economic opportunity. In 2025, Nokia’s radio customers recorded a 272 million increase in mobile broadband subscriptions on their networks, while Nokia-supported social digitalization projects reached 829,953 people with connectivity and digital skills between 2023 and 2025.

This work ranges from extending broadband into underserved rural communities to building practical skills for the digital and AI era. Examples include a Rural Connect pilot in Cameroon that produced a fivefold increase in local mobile users within two weeks, AI education expected to reach around 19,000 pupils in Finland in its first year, and STEM, entrepreneurship and employment programs delivered with UN Women across 11 countries. 

Explore Nokia’s People & Planet Progress

Nokia has published its impact report, called People & Planet report, since 1999. We believe transparent disclosure on our sustainability progress - both our footprint and our handprint impact - demonstrates the role that connectivity can play in supporting resilient infrastructure, digital inclusion and economic opportunity.

We have continued to publish our sustainability performance along material Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) areas through the Sustainability Statement following the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) as well as many other global sustainability disclosure requirements. You can find more information on our approach here: Sustainability downloads | Nokia.com,

Continuing on that journey, Nokia is transitioning our voluntary People & Planet impact report to a series of snapshots that demonstrate our environmental and social impact throughout the year. These snapshots show how Nokia's technology, people and partnerships can contribute to more sustainable and inclusive societies. Check the People and Planet hub for updates in the coming months.

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