ASUS has released a new high-end router with tri-band Wi-Fi 7 support, up to 31 Gigabits of wired bandwidth, and the ability to run Docker containers. It’s also billed as “the world’s first AI router,” because it’s 2025 and everything needs AI.
The ASUS ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI router was revealed back in January, during CES 2025, and then announced one more time in October. It’s now finally available to purchase at Newegg, with availability from Best Buy and other retail stores (hopefully) coming in the near future.
First, this router supports tri-band Wi-Fi 7 with 320MHz channels and 4096-QAM, delivering up to 19Gbps of wireless bandwidth. Your connected devices also need to support Wi-Fi 7 for the best available speeds, but if you’re coming from a lower-end router, even the Wi-Fi 6 and 6E performance might be a noticeable upgrade.
For wired connectivity, there’s a 10G Ethernet port and another 2.5G port, both of which can be used for connecting to a modem (WAN) or local network devices (LAN). You also get an additional 10G port, three 2.5G ports, and a 1G port specifically for LAN devices. That’s a lot of Ethernet connections to use up before you need to add a managed or unmanaged switch.
Importantly, this also supports ASUS’s AiMesh mode. This means you can pair several of these routers together to create a wireless mesh network, or mix and match with any other ASUS routers with that same feature. The ROG Rapture router can also be used as just a non-mesh access point for another router, though it’s absolutely overkill for that use case.
The ROG Rapture router has a “dual-system design,” one of which is the ‘Router Core’ running the router’s base networking functions, while the other ‘AI Core’ runs Docker with support for AI-accelerated workloads. Both systems have their own quad-core CPUs, 32GB flash storage, and 4GB RAM, while the AI Core has a unique neural processing unit (NPU) with unspecified TOPS performance.
ASUS specifically mentioned Home Assistant as one of the Docker containers you could run on the AI Core, which would make the ROG Rapture a router and open smart home hub in one package. The 4GB RAM should be enough for a few more containers on top of that, depending on what you’re running.
Finally, there’s all the same features as other ASUS routers. You can set up multiple wireless networks (like separate ones for guests or IoT devices), check client traffic, and configure content filtering. The USB ports can be used with storage devices for a basic NAS, or you can connect a phone with wired tethering to act as a backup internet connection. This model also has customizable RGB lighting.
You can buy the ROG Rapture router from Newegg. The listings at Best Buy and ASUS’s online store are not live yet, but the latter has an option to be notified when the router is in stock.
Source: ASUS Pressroom, ASUS YouTube
