Wireless & AI: Driving the Future of Innovation

Wireless and AI are rapidly evolving together with greater reliance upon each other to drive future innovation. To secure U.S. leadership, policymakers should view these technologies through the lens of one unified strategy. AI requires wireless networks to move data, help coordinate real-time decisions, and operate effectively with the physical world. In turn, wireless networks rely on AI to manage the surging complexity and record traffic driven by AI’s own insatiable data demands. This convergence should inform our nation’s wireless and AI strategy. Taken together, it is now clear that AI traffic will strain existing wireless networks before the decade is out, with huge new data needs, entirely new traffic patterns, and novel demands on wireless networks to do more than simply carry traffic. Accenture cautions that this could be a $1.4 trillion drag on the U.S. economy if this bandwidth bottleneck is not addressed expeditiously. Meeting the connectivity demands of our AI future will require new spectrum—larger, contiguous blocks across key mid-bands—and investment-friendly policy that enables both AI and wireless infrastructure to be built at the industrial scale of our AI ambitions.