At the Global Ultra Broadband Forum 2026 (UBBF 2026) in Vienna on 13 October 2026, Huawei vice-president Liu Kang, who heads ICT marketing and solutions sales, gave a keynote calling for ultra-broadband networks to be rebuilt around AI. Huawei sets out three scenarios: home broadband reshaped by AI; enterprise leased lines upgraded towards integrated compute-and-network services; and AI data centres, where it targets clusters of 100,000 GPUs using a two-layer network architecture to control build cost, with cross-border land and submarine cable backup to raise availability. Under four headings, Huawei describes data-centre networks with multi-plane layer-two architecture, per-packet load balancing and 'Flash Start 2.0' for lossless interconnection; transport built on 800G and all-optical OXC for a '1-3-5 millisecond' latency ring, WSON 50-millisecond protection switching for 99.999% availability, and wide-area RDMA for lossless long-haul transmission; access based on 50G PON, Wi-Fi 7 and an intelligent BNG; and security using in-built security boards, in-built quantum security and layered defence for minute-level incident closure. Huawei says integrating quantum encryption into line cards cuts network build cost by 60%.
Our takeThese are Huawei's own figures and cannot be verified from outside, so read them as targets, not results. The framing, though, is the story: AI has stopped being purely a software race and is now pulling the physical network — latency rings, lossless long-haul, quantum-safe links. When compute is scarce, the bottleneck moves to the wire.