A California startup called WiCi just opened preorders for the WiCi One, a wireless external GPU that ditches Thunderbolt cables entirely and connects to laptops over Wi-Fi 7 instead. The base model pairs an RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of GDDR7 memory, an Intel Core 3 100U processor, and 1TB of NVMe storage for $1,999 during early access, rising to $2,599 later. It ships in Q4 2026 as a developer preview, with no final release date yet.
The pitch is simple: plug the box into power, connect your laptop to its Wi-Fi 7 network, and WiCi's virtual driver presents the remote RTX 5060 Ti to your system as if it were installed locally. No Thunderbolt port required, no OCuLink adapter, no cable running between the two. WiCi claims 80 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra with DLSS 4 enabled, and 60 FPS in Black Myth: Wukong at 4K Cinematic settings. The company is also pitching the device for local AI inference, 3D rendering, and video editing, with the ability for multiple machines to share the same GPU simultaneously.
Here's the problem: Wi-Fi 7 is nowhere near fast enough for this to work the way a wired eGPU does. WiCi's 4x4 MIMO radio tops out at around 11.52 Gbps in ideal conditions, compared to 80 Gbps for Thunderbolt 5 or 64 Gbps for PCIe 4.0 x4 OCuLink. WiCi knows this and says its software stack uses caching, deduplication, compression, and pipelining to reduce how much data actually travels over the wireless link. That's clever engineering, but it's also a giant question mark until someone tests it in a real environment with walls, distance, and competing devices on the same network.
The other issue is price. For context, the Gigabyte AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box uses Thunderbolt 5 and costs $699. MOREFINE's G2 adds OCuLink support for $1,099. Both are shipping now with known performance. WiCi's asking nearly double for a product that won't arrive until late 2026 and depends entirely on software tricks to make up for a fundamental bandwidth deficit.
WiCi is also planning a higher-end model with an RTX 5090, 32GB of GDDR7, an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor, and 4TB of NVMe 5 storage, though there's no pricing or timeline yet. That card alone is currently selling for close to $2,000, so expect the wireless enclosure to cost significantly more.
The WiCi One is an impressive technical demo and genuinely novel hardware. But at $1,999 for unproven wireless performance that won't ship for months, it's a hard sell when proven wired alternatives cost half as much and work today.
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