Huawei expects AI agents to generate more than 90% of global digital traffic by 2035, a shift that would place autonomous software at the center of future network and computing infrastructure. The projection appears in Huawei’s Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action report.
The company estimates that around 900 billion AI agents could be active globally by then—nearly 100 times the projected human population. Huawei describes these agents as systems able to assess their surroundings, make decisions, and call on applications or external tools without continuous user intervention.
Such growth would sharply increase demand for AI tokens and computing capacity. Unlike today’s chatbots, autonomous agents would need to continuously interpret context, plan actions, and communicate with other services, potentially making them far more resource-intensive.
Huawei also argues that the infrastructure behind agent-based AI will require stronger privacy and security controls. The company has previously presented an autonomous platform for identifying and countering cyber threats, along with proposed AI firewalls for enterprise deployments. Controlling agents with access to data, applications, and hardware resources is likely to become a major industry challenge.
The forecast aligns with Huawei’s broader push to position its computing infrastructure as an alternative to the NVIDIA ecosystem. But the 900 billion-agent estimate and the 90% traffic figure remain Huawei projections, with processing costs, regulation, and user trust all likely to determine whether that scale is reached.
