Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, wishing you a happy New Year’s Eve filled with cheer, champagne and Mariah Carey’s comically awful rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
Today, we’re looking forward to the next year in technology news. I am watching five trends I think will define the year: datacenters will see rapid proliferation beyond the US and China; billionaires will reap billions more; self-driving cars will park themselves in a slew of brand-new locales; AI will find its niche at work; and consumer tech will take strange new shapes.
Datacenters blanket the globe
Datacenters spread thick and fast across the US and UK in 2025. In 2026, the multitrillion-dollar project of building the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence is poised to expand across the globe.
Look no further than a story published in the New York Times the day after Christmas, which catalogues the huge investments tech giants have begun pouring into India for a build-out expected to take place over the next five years. Microsoft committed $17.5bn to constructing new datacenters in India at an event earlier this month. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, didn’t even have time to leave the stage during that announcement before rival Amazon declared it would spend $35bn on its own datacenters in the country, according to the Times. Google inked a $15bn partnership for the same thing with two Indian mega-conglomerates a month prior, and Meta, not to be outdone, is building a datacenter near Google’s planned site.
South-east Asia is following India’s lead, with analysts predicting double-digit growth in the number of datacenters and computing capacity in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Singapore already has a large number of datacenters relative to its size. Australia is also a growing regional hub. What to watch in this region: it’s rather hot there for the temperature-sensitive computing facilities, which means they will consume a greater amount of electricity than elsewhere – they already consume an enormous amount – for cooling.
Brazil is making a play to be Latin America’s datacenter destination. So far, it’s working. Like India, though, the power grid has not modernized to meet the enormous energy hunger of digital infrastructure. Demand from datacenters has led to blackouts this year. Latin America as a whole is seeing a growing 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: will Brazil’s booming datacenter industry leave ordinary people in the dark?
Read more: Datacenters meet resistance over environmental concerns as AI boom spreads in Latin America
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, keen on becoming the dominant players in AI in the Middle East and diversifying away from oil, struck about $600bn in AI deals with the US during Trump’s tour in May, including one for the largest AI campus outside the US. The deals are mutual, with the US and its tech titans pledging to invest tens of billions in AI infrastructure in both petrol states.
Europe’s datacenter market is growing. The continent boasts a robust and mature datacenter market, but it has not fostered the same amount of growth or attracted equal investment as has the US and China when it comes to AI. Europe’s computing capacity is likely to grow next year, but perhaps not as fast as other regions mentioned here.
Read more: ‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as datacenters keep the city hooked on coal
A cautionary lesson from China, though, is that just because a datacenter gets built doesn’t mean it gets used. The country spent much of 2023 and 2024 rushing to build a new armada of datacenters. About 150 new datacenters finished construction and began operations in 2024, according to the state-affiliated China Communications Industry Association Data Center Committee. Now a significant portion of them are sitting unused, struggling to secure customers and new investment, according to both Reuters and the MIT Technology Review. Local Chinese outlets cited by the MIT Tech Review report that up to 80% of China’s new computing capacity can’t find buyers. What will the rest of the world do if it likewise becomes saturated?
The global arrival of self-driving cars
In November, I wrote about the race between the US and China in the autonomous vehicle industry, which will see self-driving cars appear in major metropolises throughout the world in 2026:
We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. Next year, major firms from both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis to metropolises around the world, in major expansions of their existing operations. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come.
On the US side, there’s Waymo, Google’s driverless venture. The company has invested billions of dollars in Waymo in the past 15 years. The company opened its robotaxi service to the public in June 2024 in San Francisco after years of testing and has been rolling it out steadily since. Now vehicles are very visible in most of Los Angeles, and they will be in Washington DC, New York City and London next year.
Baidu’s Apollo Go let its taxis loose in Dubai and Abu Dhabi this year. The wheels of WeRide, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company, have likewise touched down in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. All of the significant players in the Chinese market are expanding in Europe. Cars made by the firm Momenta and deployed by Uber are slated to start driving in Germany in 2026. WeRide, Baidu and Pony AI also have plans to begin robotaxi service in various European locales in the near future. Many more people are about to see self-driving cars in the course of their daily lives.
Read more: The race begins to make the world’s best self-driving cars
Billionaires are probably going to get richer
Ten of tech’s most well-off executives added an eye-popping $550bn to their fortunes in 2025, according to the Financial Times. That astronomical growth shows no signs of stopping next year, particularly with two looming initial public offerings: OpenAI and SpaceX, valued at $830bn and $800bn, respectively, though both those figures may rise to $1tn.
SpaceX’s trading launch will add tens of billions to the net worth of its CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk, who already commands a fortune of about $600bn, according to Forbes. OpenAI’s debut on the stock market is a bit murkier: Sam Altman has said he does not own a stake in the newly for-profit version of the ChatGPT maker, so its IPO may make its backers like Microsoft and its own employees, who own a significant chunk of the stock, quite rich while Altman reaps a modest profit.
Musk is also positioned to reap an enormous salary from his work at Tesla. He is now the beneficiary of two pay packages, one, worth $56bn, reinstated by a corporate court in Delaware, and the other, worth a whopping $1tn, voted on by Tesla shareholders.
The exception to my prediction of billionaires’ ballooning fortunes may be Larry Ellison. The super-wealthy Trump backer briefly dethroned Musk as the richest man in the world in September as hopes of the success of his business software firm, Oracle, ran higher than they ever had. His coziness with Trump and Oracle’s involvement in the AI boom seemed like twin rocket boosters that would send his fortune to the moon.
Just a few months later, though, Oracle is bearing the brunt of investors’ fears of an AI bubble. Wall Street scrutinizes the company’s future commitments and the mammoth amount of risk it has taken on to finance them. Oracle’s earnings knocked $80bn off its market capitalization.
AI does – and doesn’t – transform work
AI has transformed productivity in some niches. Coding, for example, looks extremely different than it did just five years ago. Customer service representatives are being replaced by hated chatbots left and right. AI has not replaced worker-level productivity in most industries, though. An MIT study that found 95% of companies’ AI pilot programs failed to provide a return on investment still looms large. Even though AI is not ready for worker-replacement prime time, firms are refraining from hiring, waiting for the technology’s potential to arrive, which means that today’s jobs are being affected by bosses’ conception of the future. For example, Hollywood, in a dire financial slump already, is turning to AI as a way to complete productions more cheaply. Newspaper readers have rejected AI-generated writing, seeing it as inaccurate and unreliable. Legal professionals have yet to work out where generative AI should figure into their field: chatbots cite fictitious cases, but summarizing lengthy and dense documents is an application that does save a great deal of time. Next year may see generative AI find more niches where it is genuinely useful.
Stay tuned for more on the subject: 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 weird new form factors
For years now, the smartphone has been the piece of technology that mattered most to most people, perhaps the only one of any importance at all. That device has looked largely the same for the better part of a decade, a big black screen with some buttons on the side. The past few years have seen the debut of several different form factors, however – mostly folding devices, alongside a few new devices meant to give AI a physical form. In 2026, those trends will probably accelerate, fueled by Apple’s possible release of a folding phone and the hunt for a device that will channel AI’s capabilities.
Apple’s folding phone has been rumored for half a year at least without eliciting a denial from Cupertino. A new form factor for the smartphone will come to a large and devoted audience. Top Androids have sported folding screens for years now, including a new Samsung that folds twice, but Apple’s audience is a captive one, locked into its software ecosystem.
Tech companies are feverishly working on a new AI device, desperate to be the first to unlock the appeal of ChatGPT IRL. OpenAI spent about $6.5bn in 2025 on iPhone architect Jony Ive’s startup, which had few, if any, products to speak of; the coming year may see its first product. The Humane pin with its glossy founders and the Friend necklace with its stunty subway marketing both made splashes but never caught on. Humane has already shuttered. Smart glasses present a promising avenue for bringing generative and responsive AI into people’s everyday lives, and these devices are already popular. In 2026, smart glasses seem likely to proliferate and advance, dominated by Meta. Generative or responsive AI will probably also come to more places you do not want it. Samsung already added its Bixby assistant to its refrigerators way back in 2024, after all. You may find yourself with a smart duvet in a hotel in 2026.
