AI will reshape the internet by 2030, with agent traffic taking over.

At the 2026 China Internet Conference, Chinese engineer Wu Hequan said big AI models are great but not precise enough for specific tasks. AI agents can fix that, and complex tasks need many agents working together. When millions of agents connect, the internet becomes a smart network for them to cooperate. He predicts global IP traffic will grow from 1.1-1.3ZB per month in 2025 to 5.5-7ZB by 2030, with 60% from AI agents. Consumer app traffic will drop from 47%-58% to under 30%, while smart computing traffic rises from 30%-35% to 45%-55%. By 2030, over 60% of computing traffic will be for inference, not training. Chat tokens will fall from half of all tokens in 2025 to just 12% by 2030, as agent tokens take 75%. This demands a new internet design that builds AI into the network itself.