WATCH LIVE Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon Unveils Future Of AI Computing At Computex

Network autonomous allocation of resources, prediction of RF signals, but it's because of sensing that you need this capability. And sensing is the biggest change in this sector. That's what's going to make the telecom sector really a completely different company. What sensing will do is we'll look at the RF signals as physical AI input for models that are being trained on their performance. What it's going to do, each one of those radio connections are going to be like a radar that you see used on a car for autonomous driving, and you're going to get hundreds of millions of those connections in real time. You triangulate all of that data and what you do, you will create a digital twin not only of the neighborhood, of the city, but the whole country. And what you're going to do with this, drone detection is an example. You detect everything that moves and flies. You manage the entire low-altitude aerial economy. You're going to detect on every road, every car, every bicycle, every truck, every pedestrian. You can actually identify those objects and annotate on that image. You bring this whole conversation we just had about computer and visual intelligence as an example into a large digital twin, and that is going to change everything. And what's the connection with this conversation we have of agent AI? This is all real-time context for agents that is going to be running on the endpoints across all of those devices. This is an exciting future for everything that is happening on the edge because AI is the new form of computing and it's going to be how computers are going to run everywhere. So now I'm going to get to the last part of my presentation, and this is the second part of what I said it was my objective today to explain to all of you how the devices at the edge is going to change AI. The second part is trying to get a very, very simple understanding of how cloud and edge are going to work together. It's now very obvious but I want you to get the same conclusion we got how this world is going to evolve. So agents are now how tokens, how demand for tokens is created and is how AI is going to get a scale and is defining both the architecture and the economics of AI. So let's go back and recap. Today most of the software, the OS, the app store, they have been designed for a human to operate. So we operate and we do things. We start an app or a program or go to the web. We do different things. It's been designed for us. Now with agents, everything changes. The agents are autonomous. They interact with software much faster. They do it across multiple services at once. That's why the device is going to have to be upgraded. And every workflow generates tokens at machine speed, not human speed. Just as an example, when you think about an application or even the SaaS industry, you think about software for the SaaS industry. Those clients today, they're being designed for a human to operate the client. Not anymore. You have to design your application and your SaaS for a human and an agent to interact. And the agents are going to interact faster. That is going to fundamentally change the demand for tokens. So as an example, you can see those transitions, how quickly token consumption is growing. So a lot of different estimates but it currently looks like this. So level one, when we started conversational, you go in and you have a single turn, you prompt, you get a response, that's about 10,000 tokens on a single turn prompt response for level one conversational. Level two, reasoning, then you now have multi-turn, and you can see an order of magnitude increase, about 100,000 tokens per task. And then when you think about level three, agent AI, autonomous, multi-step, multiple tool calls, is about 1 million tokens per task and is growing. You see the order of magnitude increase, that's about 100x increase in the number of tokens in two generations. Now let me give you the same data, different perspective. So this year, 2026, it's estimated that the global token demand within 10 seconds is about 31.7 billion tokens. So the projection for 2030 for the same 10 seconds is 1.27 trillion tokens. It's a 40x increase, and that's because agents are going to generate a lot of tokens. So if you think about the latest estimate, and I'm sure that's going to change, but the latest estimate for total token demand globally in 2030 is in the quintillions. I don't even know how to say the number. I'll say it's a four gazillion tokens, the token demand for 2030. And that is the currency of AI. Tokens are the currency of AI. And let me now share with you how this is going to work. And there's going to be a lot of people that's going to argue, there's no need to argue, this is exactly how it's going to work. We have seen this before.