Qualcomm Shows off First Wi-Fi 8 Chip, Plans 6G Rollout by 2029

You might still be digging for devices to connect to your Wi-Fi 7 router, but Qualcomm is already forging ahead. At Mobile World Congress this week, it showed off a new Wi-Fi 8-capable chip in the FastConnect 8800. It's designed to provide the kind of extreme bandwidth and concurrent connection support of a future in which AI uses the internet as much as we do.

Today's mainstream routers tend to offer Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E support, but Wi-Fi 7 has been available for years, with its more premium performance and feature set. But even that won't be enough for the agentic AI age, according to Qualcomm, which has something vastly more powerful up its sleeve.

The FastConnect 8800 will offer double the performance of its predecessor, with support for Bluetooth 7.0, Ultra Wideband 802.15.4ab connectivity, and improved range from the router itself. It leverages a redesigned 4x4 radio configuration that will massively extend gigabit-speed range compared to previous router generations. Qualcomm also suggested it would support next-gen 10Gbit internet connectivity, although the availability of fiber connections even approaching that is still rare in early 2026.

Wi-Fi 8 will bring a number of performance enhancements.
Credit: Qualcomm

As with everything in 2026, though, this new chip will also add more AI support. It'll use AI agents to "enhance performance," though Qualcomm didn't explain exactly how. It'll power all the AI tasks using the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, enabling agentic AI at the edge.

This new chip will appear in a whole class of Wi-Fi 8 routers and IoT devices later in 2026, according to 9to5Google.

Looking beyond even this high-speed hardware, Qualcomm also aims to expand into next-generation mobile internet, with a global launch of 6G internet planned for sometime in 2029. Describing the network as "AI native" (without going into too much detail), Qualcomm is making it clear it's ready for whatever comes next.

Qualcomm says 6G standards should be finalized by 2028, so at that point, we'll at least know its technical capabilities.