China Mobile: AI-generated content drives 5x traffic growth on mobile networks

At the 2026 Mobile Network Conference, China Mobile said AI is driving rapid growth in mobile network traffic and becoming a key factor in network load. Internal test data shows phone data traffic grew 18% this year, twice last year's pace. AI-generated content alone brought a 5x traffic increase, making it the main engine behind faster growth. AI apps are also changing how data flows. The average upload-to-download ratio across the network is 1:9, while AI apps run at 1:6, and some may reach 1:1 in the future. Current networks are built mainly for downloads, so they cannot match this shift well. China Mobile added that AI still faces a latency bottleneck. The first-token response takes hundreds of milliseconds on average — just 35 ms in mobile network trials, but 665 ms on cloud platforms — so networks and platforms need to work much more closely together.