Europe is tech ‘museum’ and China ahead on AI, Ericsson CEO says
China has a bustling ecosystem of AI developers, from the big Internet incumbents to startups
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[BARCELONA] Europe risks falling behind in artificial intelligence if it doesn’t speed up development of its networks, according to Ericsson chief executive officer Borje Ekholm.
Speaking to Bloomberg News at MWC Barcelona, Ekholm compared Europe’s sluggish move to 5G unfavourably to China, with the Asian nation better set up to adopt AI at scale thanks to more sophisticated mobile infrastructure.
“China has already built out a 5G standalone network,” he said. “They’re in a very good position, based on small language models, to develop use cases.”
“Europe has elected to be a museum,” he added. “That’s a choice European citizens have to live with.”
The Swedish networking equipment maker, along with its rival Nokia, has struggled with weak demand for years as anticipated carrier spending on 5G technology failed to materialise. The company announced plans to cut about 1,600 jobs in its home country in January as part of a wider effort to trim costs.
At MWC, the telecommunication industry’s biggest annual gathering, players sought to hitch themselves to the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom.
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Ericsson is part of a collaboration led by chipmaker Qualcomm to develop AI-ready 6G networks. Nokia is already partnering with Nvidia on a similar effort, receiving US$1 billion in investment last year from the chipmaker.
The rise of AI services and hardware is expected to increase the load on carriers, with Ekholm pointing to real-time information fed to augmented reality glasses as an example – a segment so far dominated by Meta Platforms and its smart Ray-Ban glasses. Faster networks would also benefit business users, he said.
Ekholm has been an outspoken critic of European regulators, urging them to allow more consolidation and to spend more on technology.
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China, whose 5G network was largely built by Ericsson rival Huawei Technologies, has a bustling ecosystem of AI developers, from the big Internet incumbents like Alibaba Group Holding to startups like Zhipu and MiniMax. Those companies in recent weeks rolled out several new AI models that hit high marks in global benchmarks for open-source AI. BLOOMBERG
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