Nokia and chip designer Blaize Holdings expanded their partnership to cover AI infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

The deal will involve AI validation and ecosystem engagement across the APAC region, centered around practical deployment use cases spanning edge and data center environments.

Channeled through the Nokia Network Innovation Lab in Singapore, the extended partnership builds on an earlier agreement with Nokia Solutions and Networks Singapore as announced at the start of the year. That inference-based deal saw collaboration on practical AI and physical AI systems across distributed environments underpinned by Blaize's programmable AI inference platform for edge computing.

In a recent interview with SDxCentral, Blaize said the arrangement tied in with Nokia’s changing status in today’s network market, moving away from telecom and into nitty-gritty AI from its previous position on the parameters.

“With Nokia, we talked about a hybrid AI platform, with not only our own chip, but also a GPU like Nvidia and complementing those together as an integrated system," Joseph Sulistyo, SVP of global marketing at Blaize, explained.

"So that's actually how this collaboration started, kind of building into what their vision, what their roadmap would want to be, and also to have kind of a more added value than just as a networking provider or a part of telco ecosystems. Basically moving really into the neocloud space, and the [colocation] data center providers are paying attention to it,” Sulistyo continued, before hinting at upcoming development such as the April expansion.

Blaize was founded in 2010 by CEO Dinakar Munagala, CTO Satyaki Koneru, and Ke Yin who together spent a combined three decades in Intel’s graphics division. Koneru also once served as a senior design engineer for Nvidia.

Initially known as Thinci, the California-headquartered Blaize has raised more than $330 million in funding to date, with automotive makers as its primary investors. The company’s edge computing platform centers around its 1600 system-on-chip (SoC) AI processor.

In its most recent earnings statement, the company claimed a 20-fold growth from approximately $1 million during the first quarter of 2025, to $23.8 million in during the final three months of that year.

Blaize recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with South Korean smart safety company GSiL to co-develop real-time risk detection and predictive safety systems based on technologies such as computer vision. This confirmed similar booming use cases for inference from Cisco and Akamai as powered by computer vision, as well as SSouth Korea’s FriendliAI.