MWC26 is in full swing and the entire industry is now sharing its innovations, pain points, and, of course, adapting to NVIDIA’s broader telco strategy. Almost every relevant exhibitor is announcing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) product or trial, while the industry tries to find use cases for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) at the edge. But it’s the absence of major 6G announcements that is the most interesting theme.
6G Announcements at MWC26
There were a few announcements about 6G developments at MWC26, but none were definitive or indicated market consensus on the final form of the new generation. NVIDIA announced a new 6G initiative, Qualcomm announced a new 6G coalition, and AMD is spearheading a new alliance to build Open Telco AI systems that will surely be utilized for 6G.
We are now in 2026, 3 years before The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) publishes its first normative specification in Release 21. Some may say that the 10-year update cycle of cellular generations is broken, but we can easily counter that by looking at the 5G development cycle and MWC happenings. Specifically, 2015 was 3 years before the first 5G standard was published, and the themes at MWC15 were Long Term Evolution-Unlicensed (LTE-U), new smartphones, and Virtual Reality (VR). There was little mention of 5G, much less than news about 6G at this year’s MWC. And the most important factor is that the companies that ended up dominating 5G were not the same ones headlining MWC15. The same may be said for 6G, too.
Nevertheless, the scope and ambition of 6G is much greater than 5G, despite the tempered behavior of mobile operators and their reluctance—yet—to commit massive budgets for the new generation. 6G studies include innovative topics that grow the core functionality of the telco network, rather than try to apply its capabilities to adjacent markets (e.g., 5G network slicing for remote surgery). Some of these functionalities include:
- Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), which aims to allow the network to sense the environment without any input from the device.
- Higher-order Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO), including much larger aperture antennas that allow communication in the near-field, thus allowing much finer spatial control for capacity in busy areas.
- AI/Machine Learning (ML) air interface, closed loop automation, and convergence of telecoms and computing capabilities into a converged platform.
There are also many more technical studies and proposals, many of which will not find their way into the official specification, and even fewer will find their way into commercial deployments. There is also an urgency to invest in developing these foundational pillars immediately to get the network ready for handling the next generation of workloads, likely to be dominated by Agentic and Physical AI traffic, not just mobile broadband.
6G Device Versus Network Capabilities
It also appears as if there is some competition between network infrastructure and device capabilities in the standardization effort, as expected. Qualcomm was the most vocal advocate for 6G at the show, signaling its commitment to the new generation, because it needs 6G to maintain its market momentum and profitability.
Ericsson took a notably different posture, announcing its own purpose-built silicon with embedded neural network accelerators, rather than relying on NVIDIA GPUs. This presents a philosophical split: Qualcomm needs 6G devices, Ericsson needs 6G infrastructure, and neither fully depends on the same coalition. These two companies epitomize the device versus network rift, but will likely reach a compromise in 3GPP.
The Right Discussion at the Right Time
Zooming out, 6G was arguably missed at MWC26, but other innovations and industry progress were emphasized. For example, closed-loop automation without a human-in-the-loop is now starting to appear in the industry, while the cloud is becoming the most capable underlying infrastructure for mobile networks. These platform plays indicate a long-term play that will surely form the 6G substate, on which new innovations will be deployed, including ISAC and AI services. 6G developments are facing genuinely hard technical and fundamental challenges, and that may be the reason for the muted operator enthusiasm. ABI Research expects MWC27 to host a plethora of 6G activities and announcements with the 6G hype cycle beginning.
Stay tuned for a post-MWC26 whitepaper on our top takeaways in the coming weeks!