At this week's 2026 Mobile Network Conference, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon made a prediction: 6G will be AI-native from the very beginning of its design. AI will no longer be a bolt-on feature, but must be integrated into the network itself. His vision is that, through connectivity, contextual information will continuously flow between terminals, the edge, and the cloud, with AI embedded directly into wireless communication systems—systems that can not only estimate channel state but also predict how it will change, preserving performance as much as possible even when signals are weak. At the same time, compute will be spread across the entire network, from base stations to the edge and then to data centers, allowing inference tasks to run across different nodes.
A Prototype Takes Its First Step Out of the LabThis blueprint is not just talk. In September this year, Qualcomm and China Mobile completed the world's first interoperability test between a U6G-band base station prototype and a 6G terminal prototype, based on the latest 3GPP definitions. Amon called it a key step from technology research to system validation, and the entire industry is advancing toward commercial launch in 2029. At the China International Import Expo on November 5, Qualcomm brought the world's first 3GPP-compliant 6G terminal prototype out of the lab for a public debut. The CIIE Bureau labeled it a "hard-tech exhibit" and a "global premiere," and it has already partnered with China Mobile, ZTE, and other partners on interoperability verification.
Terminals Must Grow Into an "Agent" FormUnlike 5G, which focused on spreading mobile broadband, 6G, slated to arrive in 2029, is defined by AI-native design, integrated sensing and communication, and all-domain compute collaboration. Qualcomm Executive Vice President Durga Malladi predicts that 6G will give rise to a new class of "agentic AI devices," and this trend is already beginning to appear in China. As the boundaries between communications, AI, and computing rapidly dissolve, the giants are no longer betting only on faster networks, but on a whole new set of devices and business models.
