By Brandon Vigliarolo
Publication Date: 2026-03-02 18:17:00
It seems like just yesterday that the 5G rollout started. Now, at Mobile World Congress, major companies are already talking about commercializing 6G. Never mind that binding 6G standards haven’t been nailed down yet.
The world has been joking about when telecoms would push the sixth generation of mobile networking ever since 5G came to dominate in the earlier part of the decade. Now there’s an excuse to push networking toward the sixth generation in the form of AI, and you can expect two of the biggest we’re-gonna-win-6G announcements at MWC to be loaded with AI as the catalyst for the tech’s arrival.
Nvidia said over the weekend that it had entered into a commitment with a number of partners “to build the world’s next generation of wireless networks on AI-native, open, secure and trustworthy platforms,” whatever exactly that means.
Qualcomm intends to do just that with its own coalition, thank you very much (there are a number of partners shared between the two initiatives), and it’s going to make its own “AI-native” 6G system “that builds upon three key pillars: connectivity, wide-area sensing, and high-performance compute.”
The mobile modem…
