Chip Brings Wi-Fi and Edge AI to Battery Devices
Nordic's nRF71 Series is sampling now, with manufacturer-reported standby power up to 20 times lower than its predecessor.
Updated on Nov. 3, 2026 in Semiconductors
Nordic Semiconductor has announced the nRF71 Series of ultra-low-power systems-on-chip, which combine Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Thread and Edge AI on one chip. The first parts, the nRF7120 and nRF7120E, are now sampling with selected customers, so the series is announced and in early sampling rather than generally available.
Why it matters
Battery-powered devices have largely avoided Wi-Fi because of its power draw, and the nRF71 targets that gap by pairing a Wi-Fi radio with a separate low-power radio and an on-chip neural accelerator. The move reflects a broader push to run machine learning at the edge of wireless devices rather than in the cloud.
Nordic reports up to 20 times lower standby power than its nRF70 Series Wi-Fi products and a 10x to 17x speedup for machine learning models when the Axon NPU is used instead of the 256MHz Cortex-M33 alone. These are manufacturer figures from sampling silicon, and no independent measurements or application-level battery results were given.
The players
Nordic Semiconductor
A Norwegian fabless chipmaker known for its low-power Bluetooth LE and multiprotocol wireless system-on-chip families, including the nRF54 and nRF70 Series.
electronica
A major international trade fair for electronics components, systems and applications held in Munich.
The details
The nRF71 uses two independent radios with separate RF and processing blocks: a Wi-Fi radio and a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio carried over from the nRF54 Series. Because both radios can receive simultaneously, a device can keep a Wi-Fi connection active while also listening for Bluetooth LE or Thread traffic. The Axon Neural Processing Unit, a dedicated accelerator for machine learning workloads, handles inference so the main Arm Cortex-M33 processor does not have to.
Timeline
November 3, 2026: Nordic publishes the announcement of the nRF71 Series.
Now: nRF71 Series parts are sampling with selected customers.
This year's electronica: Nordic showcases the series, including a Nordic-branded module, in Hall C6, booth 159.
The Tech Race
The nRF71 places Nordic against the tradition of Wi-Fi being too power-hungry for coin-cell and small-battery devices, a constraint its own nRF70 Series had not fully overcome. Its bet is that pairing a dedicated Wi-Fi radio with a low-power 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio and an Axon NPU on one die is the route to battery-powered Wi-Fi devices running local AI.
Developers building battery-powered connected products can evaluate the nRF7120 and nRF7120E now through selected customer sampling, with general availability dates not stated in the source. Nordic's Wi-Fi 6 and tri-band Wi-Fi 6E options differ in whether the Axon NPU is included, so the E variant is the one for on-device machine learning.
The takeaway
Battery-powered Wi-Fi with on-device inference is moving from concept to silicon, and the next signal to watch is independent power and battery-life testing once the nRF7120 parts reach broader distribution. Developers should also watch the electronica showcase for Nordic's module and any published pricing or general-availability timeline.
Further reading
For broader context on the chips powering this shift, explore our Semiconductors coverage.
