China’s telecoms giants bet on ‘air-space-ground-sea’ networks for future AI needs

China’s telecoms giants are pushing for “air-space-ground-sea” networks amid Beijing’s push to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure, as SpaceX’s market debut has ignited the industry’s focus beyond the Earth.
At the opening of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai on Wednesday, telecommunications executives framed the next phase of infrastructure as one that needs to encompass both the skies and oceans to meet skyrocketing demand for AI computing.
Wang Tao, rotating chairman of Huawei Technologies, said that as AI gains agentic capabilities, the geographic coverage of the internet should be extended from the current 20 per cent on the ground to 100 per cent “across high altitudes, oceans and deserts”.
He expected the number of AI agents to reach up to 1 trillion globally by 2030, which pushed operators to break beyond urban borders.

Wang, who became Huawei’s rotating chairman in April, said that 2026 marked a “crucial inflection point for mobile communication”. With the number of 5G users in China now exceeding 1.1 billion, the coming decade demanded an unprecedented technological leap, he added.
Zhang Zhiyong, chairman of state-owned telecoms tower provider China Tower, said the company was leveraging its base station locations to forge a network covering air, space, ground and sea. The company currently manages over 6.2 million base stations, including 3.28 million dedicated to 5G.
“We are promoting full-domain communications network coverage across space, air, shore and sea bases,” Zhang said.
Chen Zhongyue, chairman of China Mobile, the country’s largest telecoms operator, said that it was currently accelerating the deployment of “air-space-ground integrated networks”, along with its efforts to use AI to drive 6G research.
He added that the company was constructing a comprehensive three-tier computing system spanning massive central data centres and end-user devices to ensure stable computing power for AI model training and inference.
The moves come as traditional telecoms revenue growth slows, forcing operators to look to cloud computing for new sources of revenue. China’s three major telecoms operators have seen annual revenue growth plummet from nearly 10 per cent in 2022 to less than 1 per cent last year as 5G technology matures.

At MWC Shanghai, Chinese officials overseeing the tech industry also highlighted the trend of expanding computing networks into space and oceans.
Zhong Zhihong, chief engineer at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said China would step up the buildout of next-generation communications and computing networks, upgrading its gigabit broadband infrastructure towards 10-gigabit capabilities.
The country would speed up the “multilayered computing system” which covered low-altitude mobility and satellite internet, as part of an integrated space-air-ground information network, she said.
China has allocated resources to nurture its own commercial space sector, turning space into the new battlefield for AI competition. In late May, Beijing launched a state-backed research institute focusing on sectors including space-computing chips and inter-satellite laser communication, just ahead of the record-shattering US$75 billion market debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The country is also looking to the ocean to power its AI computing ambitions, with underwater data centres established in the seas off Hainan and Shanghai, the latter powered by offshore wind farms and cooled by seawater.