Techniques are provided for generating a precoding matrix for a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output wireless communication system. A first wireless communication device is provided that has a plurality of antennas from which multiple spatial streams are to be simultaneously transmitted to a plurality of second wireless communication devices. A channel matrix is computed between the antennas of the first device and the antennas of each of the second wireless communication devices to produce a plurality of client-specific channel matrices. A singular value decomposition is computed of each client-specific channel matrices. A number of strongest singular values and their corresponding singular vectors are stored from the singular decomposition of each of the client-specific channel matrices. From each client-specific channel matrix, a principal component-like single-client channel matrix is computed. The principal component-like single-client channel matrices are combined to form a principal component-like multi-user channel matrix, from which the precoding matrix is computed.