Smartphones are at the core of this trend, as flagship chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, and Apple push neural processing to up to 100 TOPS today, with projected growth through 2030.

Smartwatches are joining the AI surge, with global shipments reaching about 94 million units in 2025, signaling strong wearables adoption and potential AI impact.

Taken together, average users may carry hundreds of TOPS of AI compute across multiple personal devices, forming a distributed personal supercomputer ecosystem.

Wireless earbuds are a major growth vector, with 360 million units shipped annually, each earbud housing its own AI chip and collectively adding hundreds of millions of neural processors each year.

Wearables are evolving into dedicated neural processors inside smartwatch chips, moving beyond earlier shared-processing designs.

Forecasts anticipate smartphone NPUs nearly tripling in performance by 2030, expanding on-device AI capabilities.

Analysts project that combined AI compute across personal devices could top 1,000 TOPS by the end of the decade, underscoring a shift toward distributed AI processing in consumer tech.