Explore the WEF’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 – from everything-to-grid energy to lattice-based cryptography — and what each breakthrough means for business and policy.
Every June, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Frontiers, publishes one of the most closely watched forecasts in science and innovation: the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report. Now in its 14th edition, the 2026 report identifies the scientific advances that are furthest along the path from laboratory breakthrough to real-world impact — the ones where decisions made today by governments, industry and researchers will shape how they arrive in the world.
This year’s list spans energy, materials, biotechnology, medicine, computing and cybersecurity. Looked at together, three patterns stand out: these technologies are becoming more personal (built around one patient or one context rather than a standardized whole), more distributed (producing energy, food and critical materials closer to where they’re needed), and more efficient, doing more with less — cooling without electricity, protein without herds, chemistry without persistent waste.
Below is a detailed look at all 10 technologies, why they matter and what could hold them back.
1. Everything-to-Grid Energy: Turning Every Building and Vehicle Into a Power Source
Hot summer evenings put the greatest stress on electrical grids, as demand spikes right when solar generation drops off. Everything-to-grid energy closes that gap by turning buildings, vehicles and devices into active nodes that can store, return and help balance electricity in real time.
The breakthrough is happening inside the battery itself. New chemistries built on lithium and sodium — rather than cobalt and nickel — charge faster, last longer and cost less, while new power electronics and coordination software stitch millions of these assets into a single orchestrated grid resource. In the second half of 2025, Australian households alone added more than 180,000 home batteries, with state and national programmes now paying them to connect to networks that draw on stored energy collectively.
Why it matters: Energy planning would no longer sit only with utilities. Fleets, buildings and data centres would become active participants in grid stability, changing how businesses manage energy cost and risk — while utilities may need to shift from selling power to coordinating distributed networks of assets.
2. Direct Lithium Extraction: Faster, More Sustainable Lithium Supply Chains
Traditional lithium production relies on evaporation ponds that can take up to two years and require enormous amounts of water. Direct lithium extraction (DLE) processes lithium-rich brine directly using sorbents, membrane filtration or solvent extraction, pulling out lithium in hours rather than months and returning depleted water underground.
DLE also recovers far more lithium — 80–95%, versus roughly half with evaporation — and works with geothermal fluids and oilfield wastewater that conventional mining can’t reach. Argentina’s Centenario-Ratones plant is the first industrial lithium operation to run without evaporation ponds, while a geothermal plant at California’s Salton Sea received a $1.4 billion federal loan in February 2026 to scale up.
Why it matters: DLE could co-locate extraction and refining, reshaping which countries can compete in battery-grade lithium production and reducing global dependence on a small handful of refining hubs.
3. Passive Radiative Cooling Materials: Zero-Energy Cooling for a Hotter World
Urban heat islands in the US now run 0.5–4.0°C warmer than surrounding rural areas, and air conditioning both consumes and intensifies that heat. Passive radiative cooling materials solve this differently: they reflect over 95% of sunlight and release heat through a narrow infrared window in the atmosphere that escapes directly into space — cooling surfaces below ambient temperature without using any electricity.
These properties can be embedded into paint, roof tiles, window films and fabrics. California’s Energy Code and China’s Dual Carbon policy have already written the technology into building standards, and companies including 3M and SkyCool report energy savings of 15–20% in retail settings. In the UK, AssetCool has developed a coating that lets power cables carry roughly 30% more electricity without new wiring.
Why it matters: Cooling could shift from an ongoing operating expense to a one-time materials decision made at the design stage, with the biggest gains in hot, dry climates where energy savings can reach up to 42%.
4. PFAS Destruction: Finally Breaking Down “Forever Chemicals”
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) have been detected in Arctic snow, rainwater on every continent and the blood of nearly every person tested. Conventional treatment only relocates PFAS; destroying them requires breaking the carbon–fluorine bond, one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry.
Several methods can now do this: supercritical water treatment, electrochemical oxidation and UV-driven catalysis. A facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan has been continuously destroying PFAS from landfill runoff since 2023, and Daikin Industries completed a field trial processing over 170,000 gallons of its own industrial wastewater.
Why it matters: Destruction technology could turn long-term contamination liability into a defined, priceable treatment cost — but only if regulation shifts from rewarding containment to requiring verified destruction.
5. Precision Fermentation: Micro-Factories for Food, Medicine and Materials
Precision fermentation inserts the genetic sequence for a target molecule — a protein, drug compound or fat — into a microbial host like yeast or bacteria, which then produces that exact molecule at scale in a fermentation tank. The result is chemically identical to the original, whether that’s antimalarial compounds, whey protein or pharmaceutical ingredients.
Perfect Day now supplies fermentation-derived whey protein to major US food brands, Nestlé launched a fermentation-derived protein isolate in 2024, and EVERY began a nationwide rollout of precision fermentation-derived egg proteins at Walmart in 2025. Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy exporter, has invested in a start-up producing whey protein using 87% less water than cattle-derived alternatives.
Why it matters: Food security could shift from a question of arable land to one of access to clean energy and bioreactor capacity — a profound change for both energy-rich, land-poor economies and traditional agricultural exporters.
6. Exosome Drug Delivery: Using the Body’s Own Couriers to Deliver Medicine
Many of today’s most promising targeted therapies fail not in the lab but in transit — degrading in the bloodstream or triggering immune responses before reaching diseased cells. Exosomes are membrane-wrapped packets the body already uses to shuttle proteins and genetic material between cells. Engineered to carry therapeutic cargo, they’re recognized by the body as “self,” letting them survive the bloodstream and cross barriers like the blood-brain barrier.
Since 2022, more than 200 clinical trials have launched using exosome-based approaches across cancer and neurological disease. In 2025, researchers demonstrated exosomes carrying gene-editing tools across the blood-brain barrier without triggering an immune response — a major step for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and glioblastoma research. Eli Lilly and Evox Therapeutics have entered a $1.5 billion collaboration in the space.
Why it matters: Exosome delivery could make previously “undruggable” targets — especially neurological diseases — realistic candidates for treatment, though no exosome-based therapy has FDA approval as of late 2025.
7. Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccines: Turning Tumour Cells Into Treatment
Rather than attacking cancer directly, personalized mRNA vaccines train the immune system to recognize it. Doctors sequence a patient’s tumour to identify the specific mutations marking cancer cells as foreign, then synthesize a vaccine around that unique profile.
The results are striking: in a Memorial Sloan Kettering trial for pancreatic cancer — where five-year survival hovers around just 13% — patients whose immune systems responded to the vaccine had a 90% survival rate over the six-year study. In a separate melanoma trial, combining a personalized vaccine with immunotherapy reduced recurrence or death risk by 49% compared to immunotherapy alone. In March 2026, the US National Cancer Institute announced a $200 million public-private partnership to fund further trials.
Why it matters: This creates an entirely new production model in oncology — individualized manufacturing rather than mass-produced doses — raising urgent questions about cost (early treatments can exceed $100,000 per patient) and equitable access.
8. Quantum Simulation for Drug Discovery: Mapping Molecules Atom by Atom
Roughly nine in 10 drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail, often due to computational limitations in predicting how molecules will actually behave in the body. Quantum simulation models molecular interactions using the same physical principles that govern real atoms, rather than the approximations classical computers rely on.
In 2025, IBM and Moderna completed the largest protein-folding and mRNA simulation run on a quantum computer to date. French start-ups Pasqal and Qubit Pharmaceuticals are using neutral-atom quantum computers for small-molecule discovery with backing from the Wellcome Trust. The quantum drug discovery market has roughly doubled in value over the past five years.
Why it matters: More accurate simulation could make previously “undruggable” diseases commercially viable, potentially shrinking late-stage trials from thousands of patients to a few hundred — while opening new possibilities for rare and orphan diseases.
9. World Models: AI That Understands the Physical World
Large language models learn from text describing the world, not direct experience of it — which is why they often fail at reasoning about unfamiliar physical situations. World models instead ingest data from video, depth sensors and motion capture, learning how objects move and interact, similar to how an infant builds intuition about gravity through experience.
NVIDIA’s Cosmos platform, launched in 2025 and trained on 20 million hours of physical-world data, is the most significant deployment of this approach so far, helping robots generalize to situations they’ve never directly encountered. In 2026, Stanford researchers showed that embedding world-model approaches into climate simulation can improve forecasting accuracy for storms and clouds.
Why it matters: World models could extend automation into physical work requiring real-time judgment — from logistics to elder care — but they also introduce a new risk category: models that are internally consistent yet still fundamentally wrong about how the world works.
10. Lattice-Based Cryptography: Protecting Today’s Data From Tomorrow’s Computers
Encrypted data is already being harvested today by adversaries betting that future quantum computers will be able to decrypt it — a strategy known as “harvest-now-decrypt-later.” Lattice-based cryptography defends against this by encoding data within complex multi-dimensional mathematical structures with deliberate noise added, making it extremely difficult for even quantum computers to reverse-engineer.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized lattice-based algorithms as its primary post-quantum standard in 2024, with ISO and ETSI aligning behind the same approach. The EU has designated 2026 as the year public systems must begin quantum-safe migration, the NSA requires quantum-safe algorithms across new national security systems by January 2027, and Google has committed to completing its transition by 2029.
Why it matters: Beyond quantum-resistant encryption, the same mathematical properties enable fully homomorphic encryption — allowing computation directly on encrypted data. In 2024, researchers used this to train AI models across 300,000+ patient records from three hospitals without any hospital’s raw data ever leaving its own servers.
The Bigger Picture: Trust and Access Will Decide How These Technologies Arrive
Across all 10 technologies, the WEF report highlights two forces that will determine whether these breakthroughs deliver broad benefit or concentrate advantage: trust and access.
Several of these technologies ask regulators, clinicians and the public to accept arrangements with no precedent — a therapy built for exactly one patient, a protein produced by an engineered microbe, a power grid stabilized by millions of distributed household batteries. And without deliberate policy choices, benefits risk concentrating in the regions and populations already best positioned to capture them: personalized cancer vaccines available only in well-resourced health systems, or grid flexibility rewarding EV and battery owners while renters subsidize a system they don’t benefit from.
As the report puts it, the strategic decisions shaping these outcomes are increasingly being made not just by traditional industry leaders, but by municipal fleet managers, hospital administrators and regional policymakers — a much wider set of actors than has historically held this kind of influence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies report? It’s an annual report published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Frontiers, now in its 14th edition, identifying scientific advances closest to reaching real-world scale and impact.
What are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2026? Everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials, PFAS destruction, precision fermentation, exosome drug delivery, personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, quantum simulation for drug discovery, world models, and lattice-based cryptography.
What theme connects this year’s technologies? The report identifies three recurring tendencies: these technologies are becoming more personalized, more distributed (produced closer to where they’re needed), and more efficient (doing more with less energy, water or waste).
Source: World Economic Forum & Frontiers, Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026, Insight Report, June 2026.