Joby Aviation and Uber are on the launch pad, with eVTOL air taxi service starting in Dubai this year. Joby Aviation
While the world is watching hype around big language models and scandals in Big Tech, real technological revolutions are maturing in the shadows. According to IEEE Spectrum forecasts, 2026 will be the year of "silent giants" — solutions that do not promise a fantastic future, but solve specific, pressing and sometimes deadly problems of humanity. From storing energy in giant bubbles to destroying cancer with sound waves, that's what you should pay attention to.
Energy: when bubbles are more important than batteries
The crisis of "energy starvation" on the part of AI data centers requires non-standard solutions. And while everyone is talking about lithium-ion giants, technologies capable of storing energy in unexpected forms are coming to the fore.
"Bubble Battery" (CO2 Battery): The Milanese company Energy Dome is building a unique storage facility in Sardinia. Its principle is the compression and expansion of pure carbon dioxide inside a giant inflatable dome. One such installation can store up to 200 MWh of energy, which is enough to power thousands of homes for several hours. The key advantage is modularity and ease of deployment, which is ideal for backup power to the same AI data centers.
Radio cables: Another revolution is unfolding inside the data centers themselves. Startups such as Astrape Networks and NovaBlue are competing to create wireless radio channels to replace copper wires and fiber. These systems, which connect processors at a distance of 10-20 meters, consume two-thirds less energy and are 65-70% cheaper than optics. The next step is to integrate the antennas directly into the GPU chips, which will dramatically reduce heat generation and allow computing clusters to be scaled almost without restrictions.
Medicine: the war on cancer at the cellular level
If large bubbles store energy, then tiny ones destroy tumors. The American company HistoSonics is making a breakthrough in the treatment of one of the deadliest types of pancreatic cancer, which kills almost half a million people worldwide every year.
Noninvasive focused ultrasound ablation technology: The HistoSonics device is, in fact, a "bloodless scalpel". It generates ultra-precise ultrasound pulses that create clouds of microbubbles (cavitation) inside the tumor. When they collapse, they literally tear cancer cells apart without heating or damaging healthy tissues. In 2026, the company completes clinical trials on kidneys and begins key trials on patients with pancreatic cancer, giving hope where there was almost none.
Drones: from delivering blood to fighting fire
The success story of the Zipline startup is the best example of how "silent" technology is changing the world. Starting in 2018 with the delivery of blood and medicines by drones to rural areas of Rwanda, the company reached a capitalization of $4 billion by 2026, having completed almost 2 million autonomous deliveries in Africa, Japan and the USA.
Wildfire XPrize: A new challenge is fighting forest fires. In 2026, a large-scale competition will start in which teams from all over the world will compete to create autonomous early detection and fire suppression systems. The goal is to make it faster than traditional methods. The winner will have to put out a simulated fire on an area of 100 hectares in less than 10 minutes using a fully autonomous fleet. This is the next logical step for the industry: the transition from point-to-point logistics to integrated critical situation management by robotic fleets, where each unit performs its own narrow task. It is precisely for the coordination of such complex distributed systems that specialized task management platforms may be required in the future, the concept of which is being explored, for example, as part of a project. JOBTOROB.com .
And much more: the year of integration and implementation
In addition to these breakthroughs, 2026 will be the time when many "technologies of the future" will take a decisive step towards mass adoption.:
Wireless charging for electric vehicles: Porsche is preparing to launch a home system that eliminates the need to connect a cable.
Air taxi: Joby Aviation is expected to launch the world's first commercial electric air taxi service in Dubai.
Quantum computing: Neutral atoms will become a hot new platform for creating more stable and scalable quantum computers.
Interoperable mesh networks: Technologies for creating sustainable decentralized communication networks independent of infrastructure.
Robot judges: Autonomous systems in stadiums are beginning to be used to accurately determine game situations in real time, as in baseball.
The main trend of 2026 is not the emergence of new abstract concepts, but the deep integration and commercialization of existing ones. Technology is leaving labs and startup garages to launch a quiet but all-out war against humanity's most pressing problems: energy shortages, diseases, and natural disasters.
