Ericsson and Intel Partner to Advance AI-Native 6G Development

Ericsson and Intel Corporation have announced a joint effort to accelerate the transition toward AI-native 6G networks, according to a press release issued during MWC Barcelona 2026.

The collaboration extends the companies’ long-standing partnership and will focus on mobile connectivity, cloud technologies, and compute systems across AI-driven radio access networks (RAN) and packet core use cases. It will also include work on platform-level security and network capabilities to support ecosystem readiness for cloud-native 6G solutions.

Ericsson’s upcoming silicon, built on Intel’s advanced process nodes, will underpin the initiative, alongside Intel Xeon-based Cloud RAN infrastructure. The companies plan to develop high-performance and energy-efficient compute architectures suited for both AI for networks and networks for AI.

The partnership’s outcomes are being showcased at MWC 2026 through demonstrations of cloud RAN, 5G core, and open network infrastructure technologies, highlighting progress toward commercial AI-native 6G deployments.