Swedish network vendor Ericsson has announced a partnership with chipset manufacturer Intel to accelerate the industry’s readiness for AI-native 6G.

The partnership, announced at Mobile World Congress, comes a week after Ericsson claimed to carry out the world’s first live 6G trial in the US.

According to Ericsson, the collaboration with Intel aims to set out the path for a “seamless transition to AI-native 6G deployments and use cases.”

This will see the vendor work with Intel on mobile connectivity, cloud technologies, and compute capabilities across AI-driven RAN and packet core use cases.

In addition to this, the duo will work on platform-level security and network capabilities to help enhance ecosystem enablement and time-to-market for cloud-native solutions.

“6G is not merely an iteration of mobile technology. It is the infrastructure that will distribute AI across devices, the Edge and the cloud,” said Börje Ekholm, president and CEO, Ericsson.

“Ericsson’s long history of network innovation and large-scale operator deployments positions us to lead practical integration across the value chain and move 6G from research into commercial reality.”

“Together with Ericsson, we will continue to demonstrate that the future of network connectivity is open, power-efficient, secure, and grounded in intelligent AI inference,” added Lip-Bu Tan, CEO, Intel.

The company’s partnership comes the same week that the telco partnered with Nordic rival Nokia on Open RAN, and paired with Nvidia and a host of other telecoms companies, on “open 6G.”

“World’s first” 6G trial

Ahead of MWC, Ericsson claimed to have completed a successful 6G pre-standard over-the-air (OTA) session.

The test was carried out at Ericsson’s US HQ in Plano, Texas. Ericsson’s demonstration featured radio hardware, RAN Compute, software-defined air interfaces, and cloud platforms.

It was conducted with a pre-standard 6G stack that utilized spectrum in the 7GHz range (centimeter wave), carrier bandwidth of 400MHz, while Ericsson said it focused on optimized uplink, enhanced energy efficiency, and maximized spectral utilization.

According to the vendor, Ericsson’s software architecture is deployable on multiple hardware platforms, including CPU (Central Processing Units) and GPU (Graphics Processing Units).

“Ericsson’s 6G demonstration is an important milestone in next-generation wireless innovation, enabled by American ingenuity,” said Howard Lutnick, US Secretary of Commerce. “The Trump Administration will always back our trusted partners, and we are committed to an American-designed and operated future of cutting-edge connectivity.”

Ericsson claims that the 6G trial was able to prove two key capabilities to prepare future networks for AI. Those were the ability to power AI robots instantly and with real-time control, and the ability to enable real-time video streaming.

The future 6G networks will be designed to “sense, compute, and adapt in real time,” notes the vendor.