Chinese telcos are kickstarting GSMA’s “IQ era” of mobile AI

Details: John Tanner; Category: Wireless Networks; 24 June 2026; 476 views

Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2026 kicked off Wednesday with the message that the GSMA’s ambitious vision of the “IQ era” – in which mobile AI will remold the mobile industry – is already underway in China’s telecoms sector, starting with robots, drones and autonomous vehicles.

During the opening keynote, GSMA director general Vivek Badrinath reiterated that the IQ era – which the industry body unveiled earlier this year at MWC 2026 in Barcelona – presents a new opportunity for telcos to leverage AI to connect and coordinate intelligent systems at scale.

“These are systems that sense, that decide, and that act in the real world across cities, infrastructure, and economies,” he said.

Badrinath added that this future is already starting to take shape in China, where China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom are not only investing in AI technologies, but also already leveraging them for use cases such as humanoid robotics, the low-altitude economy (i.e. drones), and autonomous vehicles – all of which are underpinned by next-gen infrastructure capable of supporting intelligence.

“These technologies that we've discussed this morning are not theories, they're not distant possibilities – they're operational across China, and they reflect how our industry is evolving in an AI world,” Badrinath said. “Chinese operators are showing the world where advanced mobile networks can take us.”

Supercharging mobile with AI

In the same session, Huawei rotating chairman Wang Tao talked about the vendor’s strategy for developing the IQ era by “supercharging mobile with AI”, with a particular eye on projected industry developments between 2030 and 2040.

During that decade, Wang said, 6G will be in play, AI will be even more advanced, and things like virtual-physical fusion, the low altitude economy, massive robotics, autonomous vehicles and full-domain IoT will place unprecedented demand on networks to connect billions of different devices at the same time and at greater scale.

“How is AI going to work together with mobile telecommunications?” Wang said. “This is an important direction for us to work towards.”

Wang noted that Huawei has mapped out a three-layer architecture to begin that journey that comprises network element intelligence, network intelligence and business intelligence. Put simply, the architecture employs algorithms at each layer to enable things like equipment efficiency gains, full-domain O&M, and agentic AI embedded in the core network to create new AI-based service opportunities, among others.

Wang emphasised that satellite will play a key part in all this via the 3GPP’s Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) standards that integrate 5G with satellite networks, which will expand mobile broadband coverage (and thus AI-powered services) anywhere on Earth.

“Space-ground integrated services will also be a new opportunity for new business paradigms and models, with coverage becoming an operable asset,” he said.

This will require more coordination of spectrum harmonisation – not least because operators need at least another 200 MHz to 400 MHz of continuous large-bandwidth spectrum as a capacity layer for the future network, Wang said. That extra spectrum is likely to come from the upper 6-GHz band (6425–7125MHz), which promises 700 MHz of continuous bandwidth. Wang added that refarming and aggregation of legacy spectrum would also help.

Describing 2026 as “a critical year for our industry”, Wang called for the industry to promote U6GHz and identify more bands to expand capacity, promote industrial development of NTN, deploy AI-native core network architectures to give agentic AI a proper foundation, and explore new business models to integrate business networks with mobile services.

Mobile AI for everyone

During the same session, China Mobile chairman Chen Zhongyue agreed that the upcoming era of mobile AI calls on all players to explore broader and new fields of intelligent services, with the goal of making mobile and AI more inclusive for all.

“There is a new future that will be unveiled in front of us – that's the mobile intelligent world that is within reach, thanks to mobile technology,” he said. “And the mobile technology is made accessible to all, thanks to intelligence. […] We will further extend into mobile computing, mobile intelligence and mobile AI, so we will be much more focused on the intelligent service system and intelligent service infrastructure.”

Chen added that China Mobile’s AI services will be developed for all players in the ecosystem, not just for its own portfolio.

“We are building a service platform from scenarios and different use cases, from terminals to the cloud, from models to services,” he said. “We are opening our resources, building up this service systems to all possible partners in the whole value chain.”