Blaize Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BZAI) shares climbed 21.8% in premarket trading on Tuesday following the announcement of a strategic partnership with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) aimed at accelerating AI deployments across Asia Pacific markets.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding signed with Nokia Solutions and Networks Singapore, the programmable AI computing company and Nokia will collaborate to develop and implement what they describe as Practical AI and Physical AI systems for real-world applications. The pact is structured to leverage Nokia’s networking capabilities alongside Blaize’s AI inference platform in order to support AI workloads at the network edge and within hybrid cloud-edge environments.
The non-binding MOU lays out a cooperative framework for a range of activities. Among the areas highlighted are joint work on edge and hybrid AI inference use cases, the creation of reference architectures, collaborative validation of AI deployments and coordinated go-to-market initiatives. The partnership specifically targets deployments within telecom, industrial and smart infrastructure settings, where the partners say latency, power efficiency and operational resilience are particularly important considerations.
"Our collaboration with Nokia marks an important step forward in delivering Practical AI and Physical AI at scale," said Dinakar Munagala, Co-Founder and CEO of Blaize. The firms said they are pursuing a "Hybrid AI approach" that places inference capability where it is most needed while maintaining integration with cloud infrastructure.
Sang Xulei, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Infrastructure, Asia Pacific at Nokia, commented that the cooperation is "accelerating" as demand rises for AI systems able to function in real-world environments.
The MOU defines a cooperative pathway toward potential definitive agreements but does not itself create binding obligations. Both companies emphasized that their focus will be on enabling secure, scalable and energy-efficient AI inference deployments throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Market reaction to the announcement was immediate, with Blaize shares posting a notable premarket gain. The agreement frames a strategy for combining networking expertise and AI inference technology to address edge and hybrid deployment demands across multiple industry segments.
Context and next steps
The companies will use the framework established by the MOU to explore concrete architectures and validation approaches and to coordinate commercial efforts. Because the agreement is non-binding, any future definitive deals would be subject to further negotiation and formalization.