Wireless Infrastructure

Telecom infrastructure is a persistent strategic dependency that the entire digital economy runs on — government communications, banking and payments, energy grids, military C4ISR, AI inference, industrial IoT, commerce, logistics, and emergency response. As "Embodied AI" products take over the economy, they too will run on these rails.

Today, Huawei operates in 169 out of 207 countries (82%), more than double Nokia's presence (79 countries, 38%) and far exceeding Ericsson (99 countries, 48%). In 83 countries, Huawei is the sole vendor with no Western alternative. Only 7 countries have formally banned Huawei from their 5G networks. Meanwhile, 24 countries have Huawei 5G deployments with no Nokia or Ericsson 5G alternative available.

If the U.S. fails to secure corporate RAN leverage before 6G vendor selections begin (starting around 2027), the default future is a world of Huawei-led networks embedding a Chinese AI stack — inference, AI-compute coordination, and quality-of-service preferences — into 160+ national infrastructures. That is the kind of dependency that cannot be unwound later.

The strategic assessment proposes that the U.S. incentivize American players to acquire a controlling stake (51%+) in Ericsson (enterprise value ~$27B), Nokia (enterprise value ~$31B), or both. Options range from U.S.-led consortia and corporate acquisitions (Cisco, Tesla, Amazon/SpaceX, Apple) to taking one or both companies private through PE firms (Elliott, Carlyle, Silver Lake, Bain), with Treasury/DFC sovereign wealth fund co-financing.