Tired of 5G? Qualcomm Says 6G Will Be Here Before the End of the World

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told the assembled crowd at its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip), that the world can set its watch and clear its calendar for the next generation of wireless connectivity. You’ll just have to wait a while. Currently, 5G and 4G LTE are the standard the world over. 6G could allow for faster internet speeds, and the first “pre-commercial devices” with the standard will be here in three years. For so many reasons, I don’t have much to look forward to in that time.

I don’t enjoy considering the ramifications of 2028. There will be a new round of presidential elections (or maybe not, depending on the authoritarian compulsions of the U.S. commander in chief) that may exacerbate today’s political tensions. By then, the always overpromising Sam Altman from OpenAI could be shoving AGI—aka “artificial general intelligence”—in our faces (other major tech CEOs are far more doubtful). Today’s tech environment is so muddled and so tenuous that the idea of having any sure idea of the next generation of wireless data seems so much more uncertain. Qualcomm, of course, imagines 6G will have something—anything—to do with AI.

Because of course it is. Qualcomm has chips in a lot of different products, with the majority of them in Android phones. It’s powering XR glasses, including the upcoming Xreal “Project Aura”Android XR and the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. Its chips are in the Pixel Watch 4. And if all these devices are increasingly pushing AI for everything you do, then Qualcomm needs to facilitate that. According to Amon, the smartphone will just be a hot brick in your pocket used to communicate all that agentic AI goodness to the devices you stick on all parts of your body.

The newfangled 6G would need to send even more data to your devices, which means faster upload and download speeds. To achieve that, Qualcomm needs to make new modems. Amon said the company would need a whole new memory architecture and better NPUs (neural processing units) that can actually do something rather than working in the background on translation and transcription duties. And then comes the big question: will there be a new AI feature worth getting out of bed for? Will the reason people buy a new pair of AR glasses or a cool new smart ring be for AI-specific features? Based on what we’ve seen from AI-forward devices like the Pixel 10, most users may be able to make do without.

The energy necessary for creating more advanced AI will keep expanding if companies like OpenAI and Google stay on this path. Nvidia’s recently announced $100 billion partnership with OpenAI would build out new cloud systems as early as 2026 (requiring yet-unheard-of levels of electrical power to run it all). When Amon positions 6G as necessary for the next stage of AI development while centering the eventual release for 2028, or likely beyond, it makes it sound as if there could be a bottleneck in either connectivity or processing power that will hinder this new age of computing.

“The amount of data will dwarf the existence of models,” Amon said.

After speaking with Qualcomm, it’s clear the company is doing its best to look forward. It can’t possibly know the use case for 6G, even though the presence of AI mandates that it will be a more substantial update over the 5G standard. It’s impossible to develop technology when we truly don’t know what shape AI—or tech in general—will take in three years. Hype always outstrips the physical capabilities of our gadgets. Consumer-ready devices with 6G will come closer to 2030, at least according to the chipmaker.

Companies like Microsoft tell us the age of agentic AI—artificial intelligence systems that work in tandem to complete complex tasks—is already here. The age of AR glasses seems to be imminent with the Meta Ray-Ban Display on the horizon. What will we do in the meantime? I honestly can’t envision 2028. Without subscribing to a self-satisfied sense of doomerism—where I can talk out the side of my mouth and claim “the world will probably end before 2028”—I do honestly believe that our current tech hype bubble will inevitably move on. And in any case, by 2028, 6G will be the least of our concerns.