At this week's 2026 Mobile Network Conference, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon put forward a judgment: 6G will be AI-native from its very design, with AI no longer a bolt-on feature but something to be woven into the network itself. His vision is that, through connectivity, contextual information flows continuously among the device, the edge, and the cloud, with AI embedded directly in the wireless communication system—the system will not only estimate channel states but also predict their changes, and even when the signal is weak, it will try to preserve performance as much as possible. At the same time, computing will be spread across the whole network, from base stations to the edge and on to data centers, letting inference tasks run distributed across different nodes.
A Prototype Takes the First Step Out of the Lab
This blueprint is not just talk. In September of 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 precisely on the latest 3GPP definitions; Amon called this a key step from technical research toward system verification, with the whole industry pushing toward commercial launch in 2029. At the CIIE on November 5, Qualcomm took the world's first 6G terminal prototype conforming to 3GPP definitions out of the lab for a public unveiling; the CIIE Bureau tagged it as a "hard-tech exhibit" and a "global premiere," and interoperability validation has already been carried out jointly with partners including China Mobile and ZTE.
Devices Are to Grow an "Agent" Form
Unlike 5G, which focused on popularizing mobile broadband, 6G—slated to arrive in 2029—will be defined by AI nativeness, integrated sensing and communication, and coordinated computing power across all domains. Qualcomm Executive Vice President Madeka predicted that 6G will give rise to a brand-new class of "agentic AI devices," and this trend is already emerging in China. As the boundaries between connectivity, AI, and computing power rapidly dissolve, what the giants are betting on is no longer just a faster network, but an entire new set of devices and business models.