WiCi One: a $2,600 wireless eGPU that ditches cables for Wi-Fi 7
A startup called WiCi wants to cut the cable between your laptop and an external GPU entirely. Its debut product, the WiCi One, houses an RTX 5060 Ti (16GB GDDR7) and a 4TB PCIe 5.0 SSD in a standalone box that connects over Wi-Fi 7 — no Thunderbolt, no USB4, no OCuLink required. The early-bird price is $1,999; standard pricing lands at $2,599. A Q4 2026 Developer Preview is the only confirmed milestone so far.
The hardware
The RTX 5060 Ti inside is Nvidia's Blackwell-generation card, which launched at $429 for the 16GB desktop version — so the WiCi enclosure, Wi-Fi 7 radio, and bundled SSD account for the remaining ~$1,600 of the asking price. The 4TB SSD isn't a cosmetic extra: large language models need somewhere to store their weights, and keeping them physically next to the GPU reduces the amount of data that has to travel wirelessly. If a model overflows the 16GB of VRAM, the system can spill onto the SSD.
A higher-end RTX 5090 variant is in the roadmap — that GPU alone draws up to 575W — but no price or ship date has been announced.
No cables, but also no free lunch
PCIe exchanges data with a CPU in microseconds. Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi 7, cannot match that. WiCi's answer is a custom driver that presents the remote GPU to the OS as a local card, then applies caching, deduplication, and compression to reduce how much actually travels over the air, per Tom's Hardware pricing and latency notes. One GPU can also be shared across multiple devices on the same network, and developers get Python libraries plus an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API.
The catch: WiCi's published latency benchmarks were run on Wi-Fi 6 using an RTX 4090D server card — not the consumer Wi-Fi 7 RTX 5060 Ti unit being sold. No independent frame-time data for gaming exists yet. WiCi claims Vulkan and Direct3D support but has not released FPS figures. Gamers should wait for third-party tests before committing.
WiCi One connects to laptops and desktops over Wi-Fi 7 using a custom latency-reduction driver.
The competition
Wired eGPUs are significantly cheaper and already shipping. The Gigabyte AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box uses Thunderbolt 5 and retails at $699.99. MOREFINE's G2 adds OCuLink alongside Thunderbolt 5 for $1,099. Both work today with known performance profiles. For context on how the RTX 5060 Ti stacks up against AMD's current alternative, the RX 9070 XT vs. RTX 5060 Ti: When GPU pricing stops making sense is worth a read before deciding on the GPU tier.
WiCi One makes the most sense for developers who want local LLM inference without routing traffic through the cloud — the AirCompute network mode and OpenAI-compatible API lower that friction considerably. For everyone else, the Q4 2026 Developer Preview label, the "platform subject to change" disclaimer, and the absence of real Wi-Fi 7 gaming benchmarks are reasons to hold off. If portable AI compute is what you need right now, the Honor Tiangong AXB35 is another compact AI box worth comparing at a fraction of the price.
