“Visions are painted with words, but measured with actions,” David Wang in the foreword to Huawei’s latest forecast. The company released two reports just days before the start of Huawei Connect 2026, explaining much of what it presented there.
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The first report is Intelligent World 2035, subtitled Turning Vision into Action. The second is the Global Digitization and Intelligence Index 2026, developed with the Institute of Economics at Tsinghua University. Huawei has run this series for three years. The 2024 edition mapped trends, and the 2025 edition named ten megatrends. This edition identifies ten directions and outlines what needs to be built.
“Agentic AI is a key variable in this transformation,” Wang wrote. “The direction is clear, but realizing our vision requires concrete action.” One prediction backs up the rest: Huawei expects global annual token consumption to grow 100,000-fold by 2035, with agents generating more than 90% of that traffic.
The report distinguishes agentic AI from the assistants most people use. A chatbot responds when prompted, while an agent perceives, reasoned, planned, invoked tools, and continued learning, which is a significantly heavier workload. This claim applies to both power and software. A token is a unit of model output, and each one comes with a cost in terms of power, memory bandwidth, and network capacity.
The report describes a shift from an application-centric digital world to one centered on agents, where software constantly perceives its environment, reason, invokes tools, and interacts with humans. Each of these steps generates tokens.
Chinese policy is already moving in this direction. A government report in September said the country’s AI industry is transitioning from models to agents, with the computational burden shifting from training to export. The ten directions outlined in the report serve as a product roadmap rather than a simple vision statement.
The first direction is the broadest, arguing that artificial general intelligence requires physical integration, simultaneously requiring advances in linguistic intelligence, embodied intelligence, and scientific intelligence. Another direction treats vehicles as mobile embedded agents.
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Huawei aims to increase compute clusters by 100 times and reduce the cost of an agent job by 1,000 times. It argues that the industry must move to SuperPoD to achieve these goals, which was a key theme at Connect 2026.
Another direction concerns storage and memory systems with causal accuracy and traceable provenance, supporting the content memory storage cluster launched by Huawei in Shanghai.
A third direction is the Tau Scaling Law, a chip design method unveiled by Huawei in May, proposing to replace geometric scaling with time scaling, which is critical for a company that can't get its hands on the latest lithography.
Two additional directions are noteworthy: one calls for overcoming power and heat limits in AI data centers, while the latter focuses on security and privacy protection for autonomous agents.
There is also a direction for Agent OS, summarized by a formula: coordination, execution, memory and connectivity multiplied together, raised to the power of evolution.
The second report is about the economy. Huawei and Tsinghua predict more than $27 trillion in cumulative AI economic value over the next five years. They also expect global investment in digital and smart infrastructure to grow at a compound annual rate of 19.14%, exceeding $4 trillion by 2030. The index assesses 90 countries and categorizes them into three stages: Creator, Adopter, and Pioneer.
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The report's formulation is particularly interesting. It reclassifies the key factors of production for a digital economy as data, ICT talent, and digital and smart technologies. It argues that the integration of networking, computing, and storage is essential for upgrading the industry.
