A recent Nokia report has predicted that AI will account for 44% of global network traffic by 20235, as the growing use of autonomous agents and connected machines drives demand for faster, more uplink-heavy networks.
The Finnish vendor’s Global Network Traffic Report predicted total network traffic will nearly quadruple from 2026 levels to 3,789 exabytes a month over the next decade.
It expects physical AI applications, including robots and vehicles, to generate more than 90% of their network traffic over the uplink by 2035. Physical AI traffic, generated by applications including robots and connected vehicles, is forecast to increase 105-fold over the period, while agentic AI traffic is set to grow 160-fold.
Uplink traffic could account for 24% of total access traffic in the most AI-intensive cells.
The changing workload is also expected to shift where AI processing takes place. Although central cloud infrastructure will continue to handle most AI traffic, edge and metro core networks are forecast to serve 36% of AI-native traffic by 2035. Nokia attributed the shift to rising demand for lower latency, more efficient models compliant with data sovereignty needs, bringing “intelligence and inferencing closer to users and devices”.
In addition, fixed wireless access (FWA) will account for more than a third of consumer cellular traffic by the same period as connections and usage grow.
Ultimately, the vendor warned the changing nature of traffic could create challenges for existing infrastructure, particularly in areas with high concentrations of AI use, requiring “networks that support differing needs, from bulk uploads to continuous, real-time connections”.
Pallavi Mahajan, Nokia chief technology and AI officer, said: “AI is changing what we need from networks, not just how much traffic they carry”. She argued network readiness should become a central part of AI planning as applications place new demands on connectivity, adding, “the next phase of AI will depend as much on the network as on compute”.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Nokia
Source: Tahawul Tech
