Tech in 2026: AirTaxis, Wireless EV Charging, and More

Every September, as we plan our January Tech Forecast issue, IEEE Spectrum editors study their beats and look for promising projects that could solve seemingly intractable problems or transform entire industries.

Often, these projects go unnoticed by the popular tech press, which today seems more interested in the personalities who run big tech companies than in the technology itself. We’re going our own way here, going into the field to bring you news of the hidden gems that, as the IEEE motto says, truly advance technology for the benefit of humanity.

Looking back at the last 20 years of January issues reveals that while we’ve certainly covered our share of huge tech projects, like the James Webb Space Telescope, many stories touch on topics that most people would have otherwise missed.

Last January, senior associate editor Emily Waltz reported on startups piloting ocean carbon capture. This problem, she’s back with another commander₂A story focused on network-scale storage, which is about to literally explode. Waltz traveled to Sardinia to check out Milan-based Energy Dome’s “bubble battery,” which can store up to 200 megawatt hours by compressing and decompressing pure carbon dioxide inside an inflatable dome.

This type of modular, easy-to-deploy energy storage could be particularly useful for AI data centers, says editor-in-chief Samuel K. Moore, who organized this issue and wrote about gravity energy storage in January 2021.

Large bubbles could help with grid-wide storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancerous tumors.

“When we think about energy storage, we typically think about grid-scale batteries,” Moore says. “Yet these bubbles, which are in many ways more efficient than batteries, will sprout everywhere, often in association with IT infrastructure.”

For his article in this issue, Moore dove into the competition between two startups developing radio cables to replace conventional copper cables and fiber optics in data centers. These radio systems can connect processors spaced 10 to 20 meters apart using a third of the power of fiber optic cables and for a third of the cost. The next step is to integrate radio connections directly into GPUs, to alleviate cooling loads and help data centers and the AI ​​models running there continue to scale.

Large bubbles could help with grid-wide storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancerous tumors, as Greg Uyeno discovered while reporting on HistoSonics ultrasound treatment. Feared for its aggressive nature and extremely low survival rate, pancreatic cancer kills nearly half a million people per year worldwide. HistoSonics uses non-invasive focused ultrasound to create cavitation bubbles that destroy tumors without dangerously heating surrounding tissue. This year, the company is completing kidney trials and launching pancreatic cancer trials.

Over the past two decades, Spectrum has regularly covered the rise of drones. In 2018, for example, we announced that startup Zipline would deploy autonomous drones to deliver blood and medical supplies to rural Rwanda. Today, Zipline has a market capitalization of around $4 billion and operates in several African countries, Japan and the United States, having completed nearly 2 million drone deliveries. In this issue, journalist Robb Mandelbaum introduces us to the Wildfire XPrize competition, which aims to provide another life-saving service: putting out wildfires before they get out of control. Zipline was successful because it could make deliveries to remote locations much faster than land vehicles. This year’s XPrize teams plan to detect and extinguish fires faster than conventional firefighting methods.

In addition to these emerging technologies, we’ve added a dozen more to this number, including Porsche’s wireless home charger for electric vehicles, the world’s first electric air taxi service, neutral-atom quantum computers, interoperable mesh networks, and robotic baseball umpires. Let’s see which of this year’s picks make it to the big leagues.