Mobile World Congress 2026 (MWC26) came and went without an outburst of anti-Huawei rhetoric from Washington, DC, as the US government was busy repivoting from its obsession with China to its old standby: war in the Middle East.
But Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, mobile telecom operators and hundreds of other companies were in Barcelona, Spain, promoting their newest telecom technology in the era of artifical intelligence (AI).
Held March 2-5, the 20th annual MWC event attracted nearly 105,000 attendees from 207 nations and territories, about 2,900 exhibitors, around 1,700 speakers and more than 1.3 million views of keynote addresses and other presentations on the MWC Barcelona website and social media.
Attendance was down slightly from 109,000 last year due to the disruption of air travel caused by the war on Iran, but MWC remains the world’s largest telecom exhibition and conference.
Some 350 Chinese companies participated in the event, fewer than the number from the EU and the US, but Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi and other Chinese brands appear to have made the greatest impression on visitors.
Huawei’s exhibit covered 9,000 square meters, more than double the combined space of the exhibits by Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus. 182 companies from South Korea were present, followed by 176 from the UK and 45 from Japan.
The Global System for Mobile Communications Association, or GSMA, which organized the event, chose “The IQ Era” as its theme. As noted by EE Times, this marked the telecom industry’s “pivotal shift” from legacy hardware and bandwidth expansion to AI-driven infrastructure, “shifting attention to dynamically programmable networks and the impending 6G standard.”
In his keynote address at MWC26, vice president and chief marketing officer of Huawei’s Wireless Solution, Eric Zhao, spoke on the topic “Embracing the Agentverse, Unveiling the Agent-Oriented Network,” stating: “Mobile AI is sparking a paradigm shift across the communications industry… To unlock the full potential of 5G-A [5G-Advanced, or 5.5G, the intermediate step toward 6G], the industry should accelerate end-to-end upgrades and innovation, building multidimensional network capabilities.”
The Agentverse is Huawei’s term for next stage in the evolution of mobile networks. Noting that AI agents “are rapidly evolving from personal assistants into engines of industrial automation and broad societal change,” Zhao described a world in which “AI shopping and AI-created video are becoming mainstream” and “silicon-based productivity” is “making fully automated manufacturing possible through autonomous learning and the precise coordination of thousands of robots.”
“By 2030,” he said, “the global market is expected to reach trillions of intelligent connections worldwide.” This, in Huawei’s view, will require:
(1) Multi-directional bandwidth: Networks must evolve from today’s asymmetric uplink/downlink model to symmetric, high-bandwidth connectivity to enable smooth, real-time multimodal AI interactions; and
(2) Deterministic reliability: Jitter must be minimized to avoid safety risks when robots with embodied AI (VTLA) collaborate across modalities. This requires end-to-end high-reliability transmission and two-way interaction to ensure data integrity.
VTLA stands for Video, Touch, Language and Action, the multimodal capabilities of robots equipped with embodied AI. “Embodied AI,” in the words of Nvidia, “refers to the integration of artificial intelligence into physical systems, enabling them to interact with the physical world. These systems can include general-purpose robots, humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles (AVs), and even factories and warehouse facilities. The fusion of machine learning, sensors, and computer vision lets these systems perceive, reason, and act in real-world environments.”
At an MWC26 summit meeting on the theme of “Building an Agentic Network with Device-Network-Service Synergy,” Huawei “joined forces with GSMA, GSMA Intelligence and a range of operators and industry organizations across the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and beyond [no mention of North America], to explore AI-driven advancements for the core network. Together, they unanimously agreed that the 5G core network has entered a new phase of Agentic Core.”
Huawei’s Agentic Core “integrates AI into mobile internet, voice, operations and maintenance (O&M) and telco cloud infrastructure to allow networks to evolve and main service offerings to be reshaped. Huawei sees AI as extending a core network with three ‘transformative’ abilities: real-time experience awareness; global experience evaluation and resource coordination; and intelligent interaction and execution.”
Huawei’s Zhao concluded: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in a short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. With the mobile AI revolution and trillion-scale Agentverse connections ahead, even today’s vision may be conservative.”
On February 24, just before MWC26, the Agentic AI Foundation, which is affiliated with the Linux Foundation, welcomed 97 new members, reflecting rising demand for open, collaborative agent standardization. New Gold Members included Huawei and Lenovo.
Huawei also introduced its Atlas 950 SuperPod, Taishan 950 SuperPod and related AI supercomputer products to an international audience at MMW26. A SuperPoD, according to Huawei, “is a single logical machine, made up of multiple physical machines that can learn, think and reason as one.”
Launched in China last September, the Atlas 950 is designed for large-scale AI training and inference, while the TaiShan 950 is designed for general purpose applications such as enterprise data centers, databases and virtual environments.
The Atlas 950 incorporates up to 8,192 Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs (neural processing units), while the TaiShan 950 supports up to 32 Kunpeng 950 CPUs (central processing units) with either 96 or 192 cores (individual processing units).
US export controls prevent China from producing chips equivalent to those of Nvidia, but this disadvantage can be offset by large-scale clustering. Depending on its configuration, the Atlas 950 SuperPoD may have several times more computing power than Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin, but it is also much larger and uses more power. Both machines should be commercially available by the end of 2026.
It seems somewhat odd that the US, which has expressed concern in the past over Huawei’s 5G cell phones and network equipment, would let this all pass without comment. But the Trump administration has its own priorities.
While Huawei pushed the frontiers of telecom, Honor and Xiaomi brought more fun to Barcelona. Honor showed off its new Magic V6 folding smart phone; its AiPhone robot phone with a retractable, talking camera head that can track people and objects and responds to spoken words; and its humanoid robot that can dance, do backflips and shake hands.
Xiaomi brought its 17 Ultra smartphone with camera and lens technology from Leica, and introduced its Vision GT electric “hyper car,” which was designed for Sony’s Gran Turismo 7 driving simulator. Check out the videos.
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