Qualcomm Says 6G Devices Will Be Ready By 2028, Aims To Bring AI Everywhere

At the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Qualcomm has made it clear that 6G technology will roll out sooner than you may think. Taking the stage on the very first day of the Summit, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon

announced that the company will begin testing the 6G tech in 2028 with pre-commercial devices. He was also quick to remind that Qualcomm had launched 5G in 2018, two years before the initial rollout plan for 2020. The other big theme of Amon’s keynote was Artificial Intelligence. He said that a new phase of Snapdragon will build around bringing AI everywhere. “We are going to bring AI everywhere, leading the next generation of innovation,” he said, while adding that AI will soon become the new user interface for devices. This is the 10th edition of the Snapdragon Summit where the company unveiled its new platforms for mobile and computing: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Snapdragon X2 Elite. Both platforms bring improved performance, better efficiency while focusing heavily on AI capabilities. Amon explained that AI will not remain confined to smartphones but will expand across PCs, wearables and other connected devices. He described a world where each device functions as an intelligent “agent,” working in sync with a user’s smartphone to manage tasks which may range from scheduling conflicts to financial reminders.This approach builds on themes Qualcomm highlighted at last year’s summit, where the focus was on personalised AI assistants and on-device large language models. Amon said that the emphasis will now shift toward scaling those capabilities, combining cloud resources with edge processing to ensure AI can act in real time while safeguarding user data. “According to Amon, AI models themselves will also evolve. Instead of relying solely on centralised cloud training, Qualcomm envisions a tiered system of edge-based models that can refine and apply insights locally while still benefiting from large-scale training in the cloud. That approach, he argued, will be necessary to handle the massive volumes of user data expected in the years ahead.The Summit also saw appearances from Qualcomm’s partners, including Shantanu Narayen of Adobe and Rick Osterloh of Google.

Narayen said that Adobe is working closely with Qualcomm to create more personalised experiences for creators. “I am very excited about how people will take different Qualcomm powered devices and use them for creativity. We are working to create a firefly model that is personalised. So, people can create things in their own style. That kind of power was not available earlier. Qualcomm will allow and empower us to do that,” he said.Narayen believes that this will empower more creators. Meanwhile, Rick said that Google and Qualcomm are working together to reduce the longstanding gap between smartphone and computer operating systems.“In the past, we’ve had very different systems between what we’re building in PCs and what we’re building in smartphones,” he noted. “We’re working to combine that… bringing Gemini models, our assistant, and the entire app and developer community into the PC domain.”