MWC 2026 Preview: AI Energy Demands and Data Centre Power Struggles Dominate Telecom Industry Discussion

Summary

Ahead of Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Developing Telecoms highlights the growing tension between AI's promised efficiency gains and the escalating power and resource demands of the data centres required to deliver them. The article notes that one of the most commonly cited AI use cases — enabling improved energy efficiencies — is undercut by the surge in power-hungry data centre construction needed to support generative and agentic AI workloads. The piece points out that despite cla