As 6G Approaches, European Commission Bets Millions on Continental Tech Leadership
Two of the three dominant global mobile equipment vendors are European, the partnership's governing board chair said.
BARCELONA, March 10, 2026 — A European public-private research initiative committed €116 million ($135 million) to 20 new telecom network and artificial intelligence projects last week at the Mobile World Congress here. The group was seeking to secure the continent's leadership in sixth-generation mobile communications before a global standardization deadline in 2028.
The Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) has deployed more than €500 million across roughly 80 projects since its founding. The initiative pairs the European Commission, the EU's executive body, with the 6G Industry Association, a consortium of telecom operators, vendors, and research institutions. The new funding targets AI integration, network architecture, and large-scale industrial trials across manufacturing, logistics, energy, and healthcare
Two of the three dominant global mobile equipment vendors are European, said Colin Willcock, chair of the SNS JU governing board, and the partnership aims to use that position as leverage for broader industrial competitiveness.
Over its lifetime, the SNS JU aims to invest at least €1.8 billion split between public and private members. Of the funding committed to date, 26 percent has gone to small and medium enterprises, and more than 1,200 organizations have participated in funded projects, well beyond the traditional base of telecom vendors and network operators.
More than 53 percent of all artificial intelligence traffic now originates from mobile devices, said Pallavi Mahajan, chief technology and AI officer at Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications equipment manufacturer. AI traffic is highly variable, multimodal, and demands very low latency, she said. The rise of autonomous AI agents that operate continuously is straining network designs built around predictable peak-hour demand.
"We need to embed AI into every singular function of how the network operates," Mahajan said.
Robots, autonomous vehicles, and smart glasses will require computing power at the network edge rather than at distant data centers, Mahajan said. Routing every decision through remote cloud infrastructure from a robot performing safety-critical operations, she said, is not viable on physical grounds alone.
Damien Lucas, chief executive of Scaleway, a French cloud infrastructure provider, issued the session's sharpest warning. When cloud computing emerged fifteen years ago, European companies and governments relied almost entirely on U.S. technology providers, he said, and that dependency has proven extremely difficult to reverse.
AI is now following the same path, Lucas said. "We cannot afford relying on U.S. or Chinese models," he said.
Lucas called for European-built AI infrastructure covering compute capacity, foundation models, and applications. He cited healthcare specifically, warning that AI models trained on U.S. populations may produce unreliable results for European patients due to differences in diet, climate, and lifestyle.
Bruno Zerbib, chief technology and innovation officer at Orange, the Paris-based telecommunications operator, challenged the generational framing of mobile standards when asked about technology transformation. He argued that locking in a 6G definition years before deployment makes little sense when AI models are being retrained monthly.
"We don't really know what 6G should be," Zerbib said. "We should change the culture of operators and just adapt to the use case."
Renate Nikolay, deputy director-general of DG Connect, the European Commission directorate responsible for digital policy, said the commission is advancing a legislative package this spring to address structural technology dependencies. The package includes a Cloud and AI Development Act and a new open-source strategy. It also includes a second iteration of the Chips Act, the European Union's semiconductor investment law, with the chip legislation focused on AI-specific applications.
Nikolay cited the Digital Networks Act, proposed by the commission in January, as "a new deal for connectivity" in an overhaul of existing European telecommunications law. The act brings submarine cables, satellite systems, and terrestrial networks under a single regulatory framework. It also introduces single-market disciplines on spectrum allocation that prior national regulatory regimes left fragmented.
6G standardization is expected to conclude in 2028. The SNS JU's open call for proposals closes April 29, 2026.
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