Huawei has forecast that autonomous agents will account for more than 90% of global AI token traffic by 2035, driving significant demand for computing power and new security systems to manage increasingly independent software.
The Chinese technology and telecommunications company said annual consumption of AI tokens — units that AI models process when receiving and generating information — will rise sharply over the next decade as autonomous agents increasingly monitor their surroundings, reason, make decisions and use external tools.
Huawei made the projection in its “Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action” report, which identifies security and privacy protection for autonomous agents among 10 technologies needed to support the expected expansion of AI.
The report does not advocate slowing AI development. Instead, it assumes that the capabilities and deployment of autonomous agents will expand significantly, creating greater requirements for computing infrastructure and systems capable of securing independently operating software.
The forecast builds on Huawei’s earlier projection that as many as 900 billion AI agents could be active globally by 2035, roughly 100 times the projected human population.
Huawei also said moving AI into the physical world would be essential to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), referring to systems capable of performing a broad range of tasks at or beyond human levels.
The company has already developed technologies aimed at securing AI-driven systems. In April, it launched an autonomous security-operations platform that uses sensing and enforcement agents to detect and respond to cyber threats.
Huawei has also published proposals for AI firewalls designed to protect enterprise AI systems.
Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei’s supervisory board, said in remarks released on Tuesday that the company considers AI its “biggest opportunity” and wants its computing infrastructure to become China’s equivalent of US chipmaking company Nvidia.
