Exploring GenAI’s impact in 2025
In a mature market dominated by high-end smartphones, generative AI (GenAI) traffic was found to be relatively small, but with 26 percent of it attributed to uplink traffic.
Key findings
Today, GenAI traffic represents only 0.06 percent of the total network data traffic, but this is set to grow.
Typical traffic distribution is around a 90-to-10 percent downlink-to-uplink ratio, however, AI traffic has a higher uplink distribution, with 74 percent downlink and 26 percent uplink.
Exact uplink/downlink distribution depends on the type of GenAI application.
The global mobile AI app market is growing robustly, with 115 million app downloads in December 2024 alone, marking an impressive 81 percent year-on-year increase. The App Store and Google Play now offer over 29,000 mobile AI apps, of which, 14,000 were released in 2024.[1]
Currently, a significantly larger proportion of GenAI app users own high-end smartphones compared to the general user base in the measured network. However, GenAI traffic represents only 0.06 percent of the total network data traffic. In most mobile networks, the typical traffic distribution is heavily skewed, with a 90-to-10 percent downlink-to-uplink ratio. However, AI traffic exhibits a higher uplink distribution, with 74 percent downlink and 26 percent uplink traffic.
ChatGPT was the most downloaded mobile AI app in 2024, with 250 million installs and 546 million active monthly users worldwide as of April 2025. This user base is 3.6 times larger than that of the second most widely used mobile AI app (Quark).[2] In the measured network, ChatGPT accounts for 60 percent of total AI traffic and 70 percent of all AI traffic in the uplink. For this app, the traffic distribution is 71 percent in downlink and 29 percent in uplink. In other apps, the distribution of uplink and downlink traffic is more symmetrical compared to the general traffic distribution. For instance, DeepSeek and Microsoft Copilot exhibit a roughly equal 50/50 uplink/downlink ratio. On the other hand, some applications, such as Invideo AI, are heavily skewed toward downlink traffic, with downlink comprising 99 percent of the total.
Canva holds the largest traffic share after ChatGPT, accounting for 25 percent of the total, followed by Gemini AI with 7 percent and Galaxy AI with 2 percent.
Gemini AI has the most users, with 21 percent of total subscribers and 56 percent of AI app usage. However, estimated monthly data consumption per user is only around 2 MB, with the top 10 percent most intense users consuming around 9 MB and very few extreme users exceeding 10 GB. Gemini AI is pre-installed on Android devices, boosting the user base even though average monthly data consumption remains modest compared to other AI tools.
Invideo AI, although used by a smaller number of users, has the highest estimated monthly data consumption per user at 504 MB due to its role in video generation and editing, which significantly boosts traffic share, particularly in downloads. Similarly, other apps focused on generating visual content also exhibit higher monthly consumption per user, averaging around 200 MB.
Future GenAI impact on network traffic
Today’s GenAI content is predominantly produced by AI-apps based on interactive voice and text chats. This is expected to evolve with the advent of increasingly capable GenAI smartphones, new XR devices and the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive new media formats in the coming years. This could significantly impact future mobile network traffic volumes and characteristics, particularly through increased video consumption and changing uplink requirements.[3]
