Key findings
The top 10 emerging technologies of 2026 are:
1. Everything-to-grid energy
Everything-to-grid energy transforms buildings, vehicles and devices from passive electricity consumers into active grid resources, storing and returning power in real-time. New battery chemistries, smarter coordination software and updated compensation models are making this possible at scale. The central challenge is whether these distributed assets develop into a shared resilience system or remain fragmented across competing interests.
2. Direct lithium extraction
Direct lithium extraction processes brine directly to recover lithium in hours rather than months, without the land and water demands of conventional evaporation ponds. Early industrial operations in Argentina and California are proving the technology works at scale and in challenging environments. The key strategic question is whether new integrated extraction and refining hubs emerge in geographies previously excluded from the lithium supply chain.
3. Passive radiative cooling materials
Passive radiative cooling materials emit heat through the atmospheric window into space, allowing surfaces to cool below ambient temperature without consuming any electricity. Embedded into paints, films, roof tiles and fabrics, they are already being written into building codes in California and China. Wider adoption depends on standardised testing, integration into green building rating systems and sustained regulatory momentum in high-heat regions.
4. PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) destruction
PFAS destruction technologies break the carbon–fluorine bond at the heart of forever chemicals through supercritical water, electrochemical treatment and UV photocatalysis. Commercial-scale operations are now running for both municipal groundwater contamination and industrial waste streams. Turning this technical capability into widespread deployment requires verified destruction mandates, harmonised liability frameworks and investment in localised treatment infrastructure.
5. Precision fermentation
Precision fermentation programs microbes to produce proteins, fats and other molecules at industrial scale, independent of the land, climate and livestock that conventional agriculture requires. Companies are already supplying fermentation-derived dairy and egg proteins to major food brands globally. Whether this technology shifts food security from geography to infrastructure will depend on capital access, regulatory harmonisation and how the transition affects agricultural livelihoods.
6. Exosome drug delivery
Exosomes are the body's own molecular couriers, and engineering them to carry therapeutic cargo enables targeted drug delivery across biological barriers, including the blood–brain barrier, that synthetic carriers cannot reliably cross. Over 200 clinical trials have launched since 2022 across cancer, neurological disease and the long-term effects of COVID-19. Manufacturing scale, quality control and regulatory frameworks for this new category of biological medicine remain the primary bottlenecks to clinical adoption.
7. Personalized mRNA (messenger RNA) cancer vaccines
Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are synthesized from a patient's own tumour mutations, training the immune system to recognise and respond to cells it had previously missed. Trials in pancreatic cancer and melanoma have produced results significant enough to advance into phase 3 studies. Whether these vaccines become a standard of care or remain a privilege of well-resourced health systems depends on cost, manufacturing capacity and equitable access to sequencing infrastructure.
8. Quantum simulation for drug discovery
Quantum simulation models molecular behaviour directly from physical principles, enabling a level of fidelity in predicting how drug candidates fold, bind and interact that classical computing cannot match. The quantum drug discovery market has roughly doubled in value in five years, with major pharmaceutical partnerships now generating early deployment data. Shared validation standards and regulatory frameworks for simulation-derived evidence are the critical prerequisites for the field to move from partnership to pipeline.
9. World models
World models learn the underlying dynamics of physical environments from multimodal data, enabling AI systems to reason about situations they have never directly encountered. NVIDIA's Cosmos platform and Stanford research applying world-model approaches to climate simulation represent the first wave of real-world deployments. As these systems move from controlled environments into consequential operational settings, governance frameworks for accountability, audit and assumption-testing must keep pace with adoption.
10. Lattice-based cryptography
Lattice-based cryptography encodes information inside high-dimensional geometric structures that are computationally intractable for both classical and quantum machines to reverse. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalised its post-quantum encryption standards in 2024, and the EU, the National Security Agency (NSA) and SWIFT have all set deadlines for transition. The task now is migrating critical systems before quantum computers are capable of decrypting the encrypted data already being harvested today.
