Trump administration launches global partnership for 6G development, aiming to counter China’s telecom influence

The US government is assembling a coalition of more than 20 countries to get ahead of 6G wireless technology, a move designed squarely to limit China’s ability to shape the next era of global telecommunications. The partnership includes the UK, Germany, and Japan, among others, and represents one of the most coordinated Western efforts to control the standards and security architecture of a technology that doesn’t even exist yet. The networks won’t start replacing 5G until sometime in the 2030s, but the countries writing the rules now will have an enormous say in how the world communicates for decades after that. What the partnership actually involves This initiative builds on the Global Coalition on Telecoms, or GCOT, which was originally established in 2023 with the US, UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia as founding members. That group has since expanded, and in March 2026 at Mobile World Congress, it released a set of 6G Security and Resilience Principles emphasizing security-by-design as a foundational requirement for next-generation networks. Major industry players including Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Nokia, and Ericsson provided input and committed to building 6G on open, AI-native plat...