Top 10 emerging technologies for 2026 unveiled at Summer Davos forum

The top ten emerging technologies are:

— Everything-to-grid energy, enabling electric vehicles and buildings to store electricity and feed it back to the grid on demand.

— Direct lithium extraction, replacing slow evaporation ponds with engineered systems that pull battery-grade lithium from salt flats in hours.

— Passive radiative cooling materials, keeping buildings cool without consuming any power.

— PFAS destruction, breaking down "forever chemicals" into harmless, natural substances for clean drinking water.

— Precision fermentation, brewing food ingredients and medicines.

— Exosome drug delivery, using the human body's natural cellular packages to deliver targeted medicines precisely to diseased cells.

— Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, training a patient's immune system to find and destroy cancer cells.

— Quantum simulation for drug discovery.

— World models, predicting real-world scenarios.

— Lattice-based cryptography, designed to protect sensitive digital data from being hacked by future quantum computers.