The 2026 San Diego Wireless Summit, a sold-out event held on January 22–23 at Atkinson Hall, brought together over 224 industry leaders and researchers to explore the convergence of AI and 6G under the theme "Wireless Intelligence: Bridging Physical Systems & Human-Centric AI." Co-hosted by the UC San Diego Center for Wireless Communications and Qualcomm, the summit opened with a focus on the "Physical and Personal AI" paradigm, featuring a visionary keynote by Ericsson’s Mischa Dohler on how networks must evolve to support autonomous systems. Qualcomm’s John Smee further detailed how 6G will unify connectivity and compute to create a seamless experience across billions of devices, while Ganesh Harinath of Fiducia AI framed the next generation of wireless as a massive "Experience Platform" capable of scaling to support trillions of interactive objects.

The technical depth of the summit extended into the second day, shifting from high-level network architectures to the granular hardware and circuitry challenges of the 6G era. UC San Diego’s Gabriel Rebeiz delivered a provocative keynote, "To AI or not to AI," which sparked critical debate on where machine learning provides genuine breakthroughs versus where traditional engineering still reigns supreme in radio systems. Sessions delved into AI-native wireless architectures, Giga-MIMO, and the transition toward AI-driven analog circuit discovery, highlighting a move toward offloading heavy compute tasks to the elastic edge. The event culminated in an intensive afternoon of poster sessions and live demonstrations at the Franklin Antonio Hall CWC Lab, where student-led research and industry prototypes offered a tangible look at the future of programmable RAN, full duplex communications, and intelligent hardware design.

For more information about the speakers: https://6g.ucsd.edu/speakers

For images: https://cwc.ucsd.edu/index.php/node/419