NTIA Announces $53 Million for AI-Native 6G Projects
FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty said it was important for the U.S. to be involved in 6G standard setting
WASHINGTON, July 15, 2026 – The Commerce Department announced Tuesday it was taking applications for the remaining $53 million in its Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund.
Originally stood up by the CHIPS and Sciences Act with about $1.5 billion in funding, the program was aimed at promoting open radio access networks (open RAN) in which vendor components could be mixed and matched. It was an effort to stand up an ecosystem of cheap gear that could rival Chinese firms like Huawei.
Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded more than $550 million under the program for hardware research and development. Much of the program’s remaining funding — $850 million — was rescinded by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
NTIA then announced in February a new direction for the fund focused on integrating artificial intelligence into wireless networks. That’s what the Tuesday notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is focused on.
The funding should “enable American innovators to showcase potential commercial use cases of 6G and to provide evidence to investors and foreign countries the benefits of an AI-native 6G RAN approach,” NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said at an American Enterprise Institute event Wednesday.
“The NOFO prioritizes projects that demonstrate both the technical performance and commercial viability of AI-native RAN technologies,” the agency said in a release Tuesday. “Awardees must conduct real‑world demonstrations that generate data to confirm business case projections.”
Projects can be awarded up to $25 million under the funding round, according to the NOFO. NTIA said it plans to make awards starting this fall on a rolling basis.
Applications are due Sept. 9, 2026. The agency is holding an information session on the new funding opportunity on July 29.
At the AEI event, Roth said 6G mobile networks, whose standards are still being developed, promised the ability to “optimize, adapt, and derive insight from the information they carry” as a result of the built-in AI and sensing capabilities.
She said that the government’s role with respect to 6G standards development “is not to predict which applications or business models will ultimately prevail, but to create the conditions that allow innovators to discover them through competition.”
Roth tied that to NTIA’s management of the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, which ditched an explicit Biden-era preference for fiber and made it easier for satellite ISPs to win grant funding. She defended the move, arguing technology preference “changes the direction of innovation itself” and potentially prevents new, improved services.
Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty also spoke at the event. She said 6G networks are set to be capable of using additional millimeter wave and terahertz bands, and provide better integration between terrestrial and satellite networks.
Standards for 6G are set to be finalized in 2029 and deployments are expected in 2030, according to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
Trusty said it was important to “get the right spectrum in the right hands” and keep the supply chain and vendors for 6G gear secure.
She also said the U.S. should be active in the 3GPP’s standards-setting process, to ensure technical standards for 6G didn’t favor Chinese firms.
“Decisions made in the next two to three years will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse,” Trusty said.
