Shaping the future of mobile AI technology at MWC 2025

It’s an exciting time of the year with Mobile World Congress (MWC) kicking off today in Barcelona, Spain. MWC is the epicenter of mobile innovation, showcasing cutting-edge technologies shaping the future of mobile AI, such as AI-powered 5G healthcare solutions like Telefónica’s CatEye for cataract detection, multimodal agents that fluidly switch between text and video, and hardware innovations such as rollable displays to foldable phones. 

MWC highlights the exciting future for the mobile ecosystem, and Micron is proud to be at the forefront of this transformation, providing memory and storage that deliver exceptional AI experiences at the edge. 

Accelerating AI with memory and storage purpose-built for smartphones 

The memory and storage embedded in today’s smartphones play a pivotal role in enabling AI tasks and storing users’ important data, safely and securely on their device. Key factors — such as high bandwidth, low latency and power efficiency — are essential for handling demanding AI workloads and delivering ultra-smooth user experiences.

The unique demands of AI workloads push the limits of current technology, driving the mobile ecosystem to advance hardware and software to propel AI at the edge even further. That’s why Micron is continuously strengthening our mobile portfolio to not just keep pace but stay ahead of the curve, and we’re excited to share several new milestones at MWC this year.

Last week, Micron announced the world’s first 1γ (1-gamma) DDR5 samples. Being first to market with 1γ proves Micron’s continued technology and manufacturing leadership — and we are now extending the capabilities of this advanced node to our broader DRAM portfolio. In the second quarter of this year¹, Micron will sample 1y LPDDR5X 16Gb products to select partners for use in 2026 flagship smartphones, enabling industry-leading performance and up to 15% power savings²  — critical as energy-intensive use cases such as video- and AI-based apps make smartphone battery life more important than ever.

Micron also continues its leadership in mobile storage solutions, announcing the world’s first G9-based UFS 4.1 and UFS 3.1 mobile storage solutions. Our G9 process node enables significant improvements in speed and power efficiency while allowing us to deliver scalable mNAND capacities from 256GB to 1TB at the industry’s highest performance. These solutions are now available in the small and ultra-thin form factors required for slim and foldable smartphone designs.

Beyond our leading process technology, we are innovating our mobile solutions on the firmware level. We partner with leading smartphone OEMs to engineer differentiated firmware features that solve their latest pain points and enable smoother, more intuitive experiences for end consumers. 

Our latest UFS 4.1 solution delivers proprietary firmware features for flagship smartphones such as:

• Zoned UFS: Improves read/write efficiency and reduces write amplification by classifying and storing data with similar I/O characteristics in the same zone within the UFS device
• Data defragmentation: Increases read performance and reduces host overhead by enabling data relocation/defragmentation inside the UFS device instead of between the host and device, increasing read speed by up to 60%
• Pinned WriteBooster: Enables faster access to data located in the WriteBooster buffer, improving random read speed by up to 30% 
• Intelligent latency tracker: Logs long system latency events inside the UFS device to facilitate analysis and debugging, ultimately optimizing the system and enhancing the user experience (also available on UFS 3.1)

Partnering with the mobile ecosystem to deliver world-class experiences 

Innovation doesn’t happen in a silo. That’s why we partner closely with the leading smartphone manufacturers and chipset vendors around the world. 

Most recently, we collaborated with Samsung on its Galaxy S25 series. These smartphones deliver breakthroughs in multimodal AI experiences and are designed with Micron’s most power-efficient LPDDR5X and advanced UFS 4.0 solutions. Leveraging advanced techniques by our talented team of engineers to lower and optimize voltage, our LPDDR5X improves power efficiency by up to 10%.³ Samsung’s Galaxy AI enhances user interactions with AI-powered features like Call Transcript and summary call, Writing Assist, creative tools and Nightography for optimized low-light photography.

None of these capabilities would be possible without ample internal storage to house the large amounts of data required for such on-device AI experiences, which is where our high-capacity UFS 4.0 comes in. This storage solution allows data to be processed quickly by doing so locally rather than in the cloud, in addition to enabling greater privacy and control of your data.

We’re also proud to be the providers of the advanced memory and storage solutions designed into the leading flagship smartphones of the top mobile manufacturers worldwide. In fact, here at MWC, we’re displaying a wide range of these smartphones, all boasting exciting AI-powered features such as visual search, translation, and intelligent tools to unblur or erase objects in photos.

These innovations show how AI can transform smartphones into intuitive and context-aware tools that enhance our daily lives when supercharged with the right memory and storage. 

What’s ahead for on-device AI

As we enter a new era in mobile technology, AI-enabled smartphones are evolving into digital extensions of ourselves. Our devices are already beginning to anticipate our needs, manage our schedules and curate personalized content, enhancing our productivity, creativity and connectivity beyond what we could have ever imagined. 

New AI innovations such as multimodal agents can now simultaneously interpret and produce insights from various types of data across text, audio, images and video — opening a whole new world of applications as compared to previous AI agents which were limited to handling one type of data. Another innovation, federated learning, allows AI models to learn from decentralized data sources while maintaining privacy. As these technologies mature, they will enable smartphones to predict our habits and patterns to anticipate our next move and offer suggestions to make life more streamlined. 

Anticipating future trends and innovations

As we move toward agentic and multimodal AI that autonomously reason, plan and execute complex tasks, a strong hardware foundation is critical. To keep pace with these rising memory and storage needs, Micron is constantly optimizing our roadmap and collaborating with the ecosystem to drive and shape what is possible, from ramping our mobile portfolio on our leading process nodes to exploring new architectures to optimizing memory performance and power for game-changing AI smartphones. 

The future of on-device mobile AI is brighter than ever. What the mobile AI of the future will look like remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: as the beating heart helping data flow through these intelligent systems, memory and storage will only grow to be more important than ever. 


¹ Calendar year 2025
² Over the previous generation 
³ When compared to JEDEC-standard operation