Hello, welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, wishing you a Happy New Year’s Eve filled with excitement, champagne, and a comically terrible rendition of Mariah Carey. Auld Lang Syne,
Today, we’re looking ahead to the next year in technology news. I see five trends that I think will define the year: Datacenters will see rapid proliferation beyond the US and China; Billionaires will earn billions more; Self-driving cars will park themselves in many new locations; AI will find its place in the workplace; And consumer technology will take strange new shapes.
Datacenters cover the world
FILE – Cars pass near data centers that house computer servers and hardware needed to support modern internet use, such as artificial intelligence, in Ashburn, Virginia on July 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Ted Sheffery, File) Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP
Datacenters spread rapidly across the US and UK in 2025. In 2026, the multitrillion-dollar project to build the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence is set to expand worldwide.
Look no further than a story published in the new York Times The day after Christmas, the list of huge investments to be made by tech giants in India in the next five years has started. At an event earlier this month, Microsoft had pledged $17.5 billion to build new datacenters in India. According to the Times, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, didn’t even have time to leave the stage during that announcement before rival Amazon announced it would spend $35 billion on its own datacenters in the country. Google struck a $15bn partnership with two Indian mega-conglomerates for the same thing a month ago, and Meta, not to be left behind, is building a datacenter near Google’s planned site.
Southeast Asia is following India analysts Double-digit growth in the number of datacenters and computing capacity is predicted in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Singapore already has a large number of datacenters compared to its size. Australia is also a growing regional hub. What to see in this area: It is That’s hot enough for temperature-sensitive computing facilitiesWhich means they will consume larger amounts of power than elsewhere – they already consume huge amounts of power for cooling.
Brazil is making a bid to become Latin America’s datacenter destination. So far, it’s working. However, like India, the power grid has not modernized to meet the huge energy appetite of the digital infrastructure. Blackouts have occurred this year due to demand on datacenters. Latin America as a whole is seeing increasing resistance from environmental activists to the rapid construction of datacenters, which are often shrouded in legal secrecy that prevents local communities from knowing how much electricity and water they will consume.
Read more: Power struggle: Brazil’s fastest growing data center Industry left common people in the dark?
Read more: Datacenters face resistance over environmental concerns as AI boom spreads in Latin America
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, seeking to become major players in AI in the Middle East and diversify away from oil, inked nearly $600 billion in AI deals with the US during Trump’s visit in May, including the largest AI campus outside the US. The deals are mutual, with the US and its tech giants pledging to invest tens of billions in AI infrastructure in both petrolheads.
Europe’s datacenter market is growing. The continent boasts a strong and mature datacenter market, but when it comes to AI it has not driven the same amount of growth or attracted investment on par with the US and China. Europe’s computing capacity is likely to grow next year, but perhaps not as fast as the other regions mentioned here.
Read more: ‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families face trouble with datacentresIt keeps the city stuck on coal
However, a cautionary lesson from China is that just because a datacenter is built does not mean it is used. The country spent much of 2023 and 2024 building a new arsenal of datacenters. Nearly 150 new datacenters are slated to complete construction and begin operation in 2024, according to the state-affiliated China Communications Industry Association Data Center Committee. According to both, a large portion of them now lies untapped and is struggling to secure customers and new investment reuters And MIT Technology ReviewThe MIT Tech Review report cites local Chinese outlets as saying that 80% of China’s new computing capacity is unable to find buyers, What will happen if the rest of the world also gets saturated like this?
The global arrival of self-driving cars
In November, I wrote about the competition between the US and China in the autonomous vehicle industry, which will see self-driving cars in major metropolises around the world in 2026:
We are on the verge of the global advent of self-driving cars. Over the next year, major companies in both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis in metropolises around the world, in a major expansion of their existing operations. These companies are acting in the press as if male birds are fighting for the same mate; This dance sets the stage for the upcoming global competition.
On the US side, Waymo is Google’s driverless venture. The company has invested billions of dollars in Waymo over the past 15 years. The company opened its robotaxi service to the public in San Francisco in June 2024 after years of testing and has been continuously rolling out updates since then. The vehicles are now highly visible in much of Los Angeles, and they will also appear in Washington DC, New York City and London next year.
Baidu’s Apollo Go launched its taxis in Dubai and Abu Dhabi this year. WeRide, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company, has also rolled up its wheels in the UAE and Singapore. All important players in the Chinese market are expanding in Europe. The cars, made by the firm Momenta and deployed by Uber, will begin driving in Germany in 2026. Veride, Baidu and Pony AI also plan to launch robotaxi services in various European locations in the near future. Many people are going to see self-driving cars in their daily lives.
Read more: The race to build the world’s best self-driving cars has begun
Billionaires are probably going to get even richer
The ten richest tech executives are set to increase their fortunes by $550 billion by 2025, according to a report. financial TimesThat astronomical growth shows no signs of stopping next year, especially with two imminent initial public offerings: OpenAI and SpaceX, valued at $830 billion and $800 billion, respectively, although both figures could rise to $1 trillion.
According to Forbes, SpaceX’s trading launch will add tens of billions of dollars to the net worth of its CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk, who is already worth about $600 billion. OpenAI’s debut on the stock market is a bit ambiguous: Sam Altman has said he has no stake in the new for-profit version of the ChatGPT creator, so its IPO could make its backers, like Microsoft and its own employees, quite rich, who own a significant portion of the stock, while Altman stands to profit modestly.
Musk is also in a position to earn a huge salary from his work at Tesla. He is now the beneficiary of two pay packages, one, worth $56 billion, restored by a corporate court in Delaware, and the other, worth $1 trillion, voted on by Tesla shareholders.
The exception to my prediction of rising fortunes for billionaires may be Larry Ellison. The ultra-wealthy Trump supporter briefly ousted Musk as the world’s richest man in September as expectations for the success of his business software firm Oracle grew higher than ever. His ease with Trump and Oracle’s involvement in the AI boom seemed like twin rocket boosters that would send his fortunes to the moon.
However, just a few months later, Oracle is facing the brunt of investors’ fears of an AI bubble. Wall Street scrutinizes a company’s future commitments and the enormous amount of risk taken to finance them. Oracle’s earnings slashed its market capitalization by $80 billion.
AI transforms work – and doesn’t
AI has transformed productivity in some sectors. For example, codingLooks vastly different than it did just five years ago. Customer service representatives are being replaced by hated chatbots left and right. However, AI has not replaced worker-level productivity in most industries. An MIT study found 95% of companies have AI pilot programs Failure to provide returns on investment still looms large. Even though AI isn’t ready to be employee-replaced in prime time, companies are avoiding hiring while waiting for the technology’s potential to arrive, which means today’s jobs are being influenced by owners’ vision of the future. For example, Hollywood, already struggling with a severe financial downturn, is turning to AI as a way to complete productions more cheaply. Newspaper readers have rejected AI-generated writing as inaccurate and unreliable. Legal professionals have yet to work out where generative AI should work in their field: chatbots cite hypothetical cases, but summarizing long and dense documents is an application that saves a lot of time. Over the next year, Generative AI may find more areas where it is truly useful.
Stay tuned for more on the topic: The Guardian will begin publishing a year-long series on AI and the future of work in early 2026.
Can I interest you in a new device? Consumer hardware gets strange new form factors
For many years now, the smartphone has been the piece of technology that matters most to most people, perhaps the only one of any importance. That device looks pretty much the same as it has for most of a decade, a big black screen with a few buttons on the side. However, the past few years have seen the introduction of many different form factors – mostly folding devices, as well as some new devices to give AI a physical form. In 2026, those trends will likely accelerate, driven by the potential release of Apple’s folding phone and the search for a device that will channel the capabilities of AI.
Apple’s folding phone has been rumored for at least half a year, but Cupertino hasn’t denied it. A new form factor for smartphones will bring a larger and dedicated audience. Top Androids have had folding screens for several years now, including a new Samsung one that folds twice, but Apple’s audience is a captive one, locked into its software ecosystem.
Tech companies are rapidly working on a new AI device, desperate to be the first to unlock the appeal of chatty IRL. OpenAI spent about $6.5 billion in 2025 on iPhone architect Jony Ive’s startup, which had very few, if any, products to speak of; Its first product can be seen in the coming year. The Humane Pin, with its flashy founders, and the Friend Necklace, with its stunt subway marketing, both made waves but never became popular. Humane is already closed. Smart glasses present a promising opportunity to bring generative and responsive AI into people’s everyday lives, and these devices are already popular. In 2026, smart glasses dominated by meta are likely to grow and lead the way. Generative or responsive AI will probably turn up in more places where you don’t want it. After all, Samsung already added its Bixby assistant to its refrigerators in 2024. You may find yourself in a hotel in 2026 with a smart duvet.
