Huawei Forecasts AI Agents to Drive Over 90% of Global Token Traffic by 2035

Huawei Technologies predicts that autonomous AI agents will represent more than 90% of global AI token traffic by 2035, a development that would require a dramatic expansion of computing power and sophisticated new security systems.

The forecast was published Wednesday in the Chinese technology company's "Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action" report.

A Surge in AI Activity

The report anticipates a sharp increase in the annual consumption of AI tokens—the fundamental units of data that models process when receiving and generating information. This growth is expected to be driven by a proliferation of autonomous agents designed to continuously monitor their environments, reason, make decisions, and interact with external tools without direct human input.

This latest projection builds on a previous Huawei forecast suggesting that as many as 900 billion AI agents could be active globally by 2035, a figure that is roughly 100 times the projected human population. The company views the integration of AI into the physical world as a critical step toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), where systems can perform a wide range of tasks at or above human-level capabilities.

Infrastructure and Security Implications

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Huawei's report identifies security and privacy protection for autonomous agents as one of the 10 key technologies needed to support this future. The company is actively developing solutions to address these challenges, having launched an autonomous security-operations platform in April that uses agents to detect and respond to cyber threats.

The company has also published proposals for specialized AI firewalls to protect enterprise AI systems. This strategic focus aligns with the report's conclusion that the rise of autonomous agents will necessitate major upgrades to both computing and security infrastructure.

Huawei's Strategic Vision

The forecast underscores Huawei's strategic ambitions in the artificial intelligence sector. In remarks released Tuesday, Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei's supervisory board, told employees that the company views AI as its "biggest opportunity."

He added that a primary goal for Huawei is for its computing infrastructure to become China's domestic equivalent of U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, which currently dominates the market for AI training hardware.