Agents Multiply the Compute They Consume
IDC expects active agents to grow roughly sevenfold by 2030, and the compute supply gap to persist.
IDC and Inspur reported on 11 November 2026 that active agents worldwide will rise from 79.4 million in 2026 to 2.216 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 129.8% globally and 151.2% in China. The mechanism is straightforward: a single request from an agent triggers multiple rounds of tool calls, multiplying inference consumption per task. The forecast also projects that demand fulfilment for AI compute will fall from 79% in 2024 to 71% in 2027 before recovering to only 77% by 2030. Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen lead a top-ten compute city ranking, with Beijing’s intelligent compute investment at $17.68 billion. One caveat: the brief’s headline token CAGR of 4,822.6% and the body’s Chinese figure of 3,499.3% are different scopes and should not be cited interchangeably.