Like it or not, you are already distributing billions of AI tokens every day. To enterprises, to consumers, and increasingly to your best new customers, which are not people at all. AI agents are already on your network. Humanoids, delivery robots, drones, and every other intelligent machine anyone can imagine will follow, and they will all move their atomic units of intelligence across your infrastructure.
You can be in denial about this and call them bits. Nokia has already measured AI at roughly a fifth of network traffic, with global production exceeding 100 trillion tokens a day and more than half of generative AI usage occurring on mobile devices. Bell Labs expects AI to account for about 30% of wide-area traffic by 2034. So you can keep spending 20% of revenue on capex, watch traffic compound in the mid-twenties, and tell investors this is a growth story.
But we know it is not. None of these customers will pay you more for connectivity. Moving bits will continue to erode in price, as they have every year for thirty years. Sorry, I don´t write those rules for this industry.
Think like this: you are in the tap water business, crucial for life, but nobody pays more than 50 cents for a bottle of water.
But now, you have a golden opportunity in this gold rush, and it is not the one most operators are chasing.