MWC 2025: Key Takeaways Shaping the Future of Mobile Technology

Each year, Barcelona transforms into a global hub of technological innovation, hosting the Mobile World Congress (MWC) – a premier event that brings together industry leaders, innovators, and enthusiasts to showcase and explore the latest technology advancements. Each year MWC serves as a barometer for the industry’s current state and a predictor of future trends, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between AI and mobile technologies.

With the Arm compute platform powering AI experiences from cloud to edge, MWC is a pivotal event to showcase our contributions to the evolving technology landscape as we deliver end-to-end power-efficient computing combined with high performance. Arm Chief Marketing Officer Ami Badani set the scene for MWC 2025 in a Fireside Chat with Tech Arena, discussing how power-efficient compute is fueling the next wave of AI innovation and enabling new use cases and experiences across industries.

Accelerating on-device AI performance with Arm at MWC 2025

On-device audio generation accelerated by 30x

One of the standout showcases at MWC 2025 was Arm’s collaboration with Stability AI. This demonstrated how integrating Arm’s KleidiAI performance optimizations with Stability AI’s distilled “Stable Audio Open” model significantly enhances on-device audio generation capabilities. This reduces the response time to create audio clips from minutes to seconds—a 30x improvement.

This allows users to produce high-quality audio directly on their smartphone devices without the need for an internet connection. The demonstration utilized the vivo X200 Series powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 chipset, which features the latest Armv9 CPUs.

Learn more about Arm and Stability AI partnership.  

Bringing faster multimodal AI workloads at the edge with Alibaba’s Qwen Model

The latest KleidiAI integration with MNN, a lightweight open source deep learning framework developed and maintained by Alibaba, has led to faster response times across key AI multimodal use cases at the edge on mobile devices. At MWC 2025, we demoed these faster multimodal experiences in action on mobile, highlighting how Alibaba’s Qwen2-VL-2B Instruct model – which is designed for text, image and audio data types – understands diverse combinations of visual and text inputs before responding with a summary of what is in the image. Like the demo with Stability AI, all this happens on the Arm CPU on smartphone devices.

Learn more on Arm KleidiAI integration with the MNN framework.

A glimpse of the future of AI

The future of AI is being shaped by advancements in agentic AI, multimodal AI, and their integration into edge devices, like smartphones. During MWC 2025, Chris Bergey, SVP and GM for Arm’s Client Line of Business, and Ami Badani reflected on these key trends and what they mean for technology and society in the future.

In his MWC keynote, Chris Bergey reinforced the importance of power-efficient computing to enable the full transformative benefits of AI. He said: “The reality is, with this power problem we’re not going to be able to enjoy what AI can bring to us, because ultimately, no power means no AI. We need to rethink everything – starting with how we build devices.”

Chris Bergey also shared insights on the breakthrough AI technologies shaping the future. He referenced the convergence of these technologies in wearable devices, especially AI-powered smart glasses that represent a significant leap towards seamless human-computer interaction. For instance, smart glasses are now offering features like real-time language translation, hands-free communication, and augmented reality (AR) experiences, effectively blending digital information with the physical world. This integration not only enhances accessibility and convenience but also opens new avenues for applications in fields such as healthcare, education, and entertainment.

Meanwhile, Ami Badani explained how agentic AI will be the next inflection point of AI. Agentic AI refers to AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making and task execution with minimal human intervention. These systems, often comprising AI agents, can analyze data, develop strategies, and perform actions to boost innovation and productivity, with one great example being “Cristal intelligence” which is the result of a collaboration between OpenAI and SoftBank Group where Arm is a leading technology partner.

Pioneering innovations across telecoms

The first milestone in integrating AI into radio access networks

Celebrating its first anniversary following its introduction at MWC 2024, the AI-RAN Alliance – where Arm is a founding member – highlighted significant milestones in integrating AI across radio access networks (RAN). The Alliance has expanded to 75 members across 17 countries, encompassing technology companies, academic institutions, service providers, industry associations, and labs.

At MWC 2025, the Alliance showcased ten cutting-edge demonstrations, illustrating how AI-native RAN technologies can enhance network efficiency, unlock new revenue streams, and enable groundbreaking AI services. One of the demos featured James, NVIDIA’s Interactive Digital Human, with the RAN running completely on the Arm-based Grace CPU with layer1 offload on the NVIDIA Hopper GPU. This means the remaining GPU capacity, using the Multi-Instance GPU (MIG), can be used to run “James”.

Ampere’s move to telecom using Arm processors

Elsewhere, Ampere Computing unveiled its plans to move into the telecommunications sector with Arm-based server processors. Ampere’s Altra processors, known for their high core density and energy efficiency, are tailored to meet the escalating computational demands of 5G networks and edge processing.

The adoption of Arm-based solutions in telecoms signifies a shift towards more scalable and power-efficient infrastructures, addressing the industry’s need for sustainable and cost-effective operations.

Accelerating the evolution of silicon

Arm also referenced the transformative potential of the Chiplet System Architecture (CSA) in accelerating silicon innovation through industry collaboration. At MWC 2025, Eddie Ramirez, VP Go-to-Market in Arm’s Infrastructure Line of Business, shared how industry alignment on foundational silicon design choices can accelerate system innovation.

Furthermore, Mohamed Awad, SVP and GM for Arm’s Infrastructure Line of Business, was featured on theCUBE’s coverage of MWC2025, discussing Arm’s evolution and influence in AI and silicon design. The conversation focused on Arm’s AI-driven innovations and custom silicon solutions for high-performance, sustainable computing infrastructure.

Pioneering innovations across telecoms

MWC 2025 highlighted the convergence of AI, mobile innovation, and connectivity. Arm’s pivotal role in these advancements underscores our commitment to shaping a future where technology seamlessly integrates into daily lives to enhance and enrich experiences. Throughout MWC, Arm was shown to be central to AI-powered mobile experiences, with our compute platform paving the way for a more connected and intelligent world.