NOK has strong recent AI/cloud growth and fair valuation but faces low-margin constraints and slow top-line growth, leading to a cautious stance relative to other picks.

All right. Now, moving right along to the fourth stock on the list. We're going to step slightly outside the traditional data center space to look at some of the back-end infrastructure that powers global telecommunications.

And that's going to be in Nokia, ticker symbol NOK, where Nvidia holds a similarly large position at over 2.2 billion dollars worth of the stock.

Now, of course, back in the day, Nokia was mostly known for their indestructible brick cell phones, which I saw in a couple of those myself, too. I even had their newer Windows phones, if you remember those.

But today, this is a much different company. One that reinvented themselves, really, with back-end networking businesses that will likely play a leading role in the upcoming wave of even 6G technologies, too.

I see with Nvidia, the two companies actually signed a strategic partnership to pioneer what they call AI RAN, which stands for AI-powered radio access networks. Instead of having plain cell towers that simply bounce mobile data back and forth, they're actually turning them into mini AI data centers that get even integrated with Nvidia's latest GPUs directly into Nokia's base architecture.

For which Nokia claims that they can more than double the data capacity of existing radio spectrum by 2028. That's a big deal. Now, T-Mobile, for example, has already signed on to start trialing this new tech in the real world.

And if you look at their most recent earnings, that momentum seems to be moving along nicely, too. Their net sales for AI and cloud customers, it exploded by over 100% year over year.

As promising as all of this sounds though, I'd still be a little cautious. Telecom equipment tends to be a low-margin business, and turnarounds in the sector are notorious for taking many years to play out.

Which is why Nokia sometimes sees dips in their financials and are only expected to grow by a single-digit rate on the top line moving forward. A profitability is improving though, with much higher EPS growth and a strong return to free cash flow growth, too.

That, when coupled with the recent dip in price, the valuation isn't too terrible. It's sitting just a bit higher than the sector on earnings, even cheaper based on sales.

But I still feel that a couple of these other stocks hold more promise, in my opinion, long-term. So, I'm going to bump um Synopsys and Neousys up one spot to put Nokia just under them at number uh where we at here? Four on our four on our rankings.