After a year defined by immense hype, and equally immense learning, the technology industry steps into 2026 with a distinctly more grounded mindset. The excitement of 2025 was tempered by hard truths, none more sobering than MIT’s often-cited finding that 95% of AI projects never move beyond the pilot phase. Yet the shadow this cast over the industry has also had a positive effect. It has forced leaders to think more critically not only about how they adopt transformative technology, but why. It has pushed organisations to confront whether their systems, processes and even corporate cultures are prepared for the paradigm shifts that AI, data and modern infrastructure demand.

2026 is set to usher in more thoughtful, more sustainable and ultimately, more valuable advancements. Here are the developments we can expect to see take shape.

by Fred Lherault, CTO EMEA/Emerging, Pure Storage

Organisations will stop using one solution for cyber resilience

The number of high profile attacks has been staggering in the last year. In the first half of 2025, Microsoft data showed that the UAE ranked 9th globally while Saudi Arabia ranked 23rd globally for the frequency of customers impacted by cyber activity.

The historical approach — that of considering cyber resilience as a stand alone issue, where one vendor can protect an entire company — will be put to bed. Organisations will move away from using point solutions and embrace the wider ecosystem of options as understanding grows that they can’t go it alone.

An interconnected framework can help prevent a ripple effect when an attack happens — users should be able to identify and halt an attack in progress. The rate and scale of attacks will continue and having a properly integrated framework is vital to mitigate risk and speed up recovery.

Energy availability will seriously constrain data centres and Terabytes per Watt should become an industry standard measurement

While efforts to reduce energy use have fallen down the political and business agenda in other regions, it does continue to be a focus in the region. I see three big trends:

1. Energy availability will be a key criteria when it comes to building new data centres and electricity scarcity will hold back construction. Data centre architecture and location will be now primarily based on access to energy. I expect the colocation of energy generation and data centres to avoid dependencies on an underprovisioned grid.

2. District heating solutions (distributing the waste heat produced by data centres in other places) will start to be more prevalent. Providers will start doing something with the heat produced, be it diverting it to residential properties or greenhouses for agriculture. However, until it’s mandated by regulation, it won't be taken seriously and governments need to consider this.

3. Another industry standard which should be updated is the way data storage efficiency is measured. Terabytes per Watt (TBe/W) measures the amount of data stored per unit of energy and should be introduced. This is a relevant and clear measurement that captures real-world energy use, and is a simple, vendor neutral, and accurate benchmark. This approach could reduce the impact of increases in energy prices, enhance energy security, and relieve pressure on overstretched infrastructure.

The AI hype has died and reality has set in: data readiness and inference are key for the Enterprise

While some organisations are still convincing themselves how essential AI is, most are now realistic about what they do, and crucially, don’t deploy. The switch in focus from training to inference means that without a robust inference platform, and the ability to get data ready for AI pipelines, organisations are set to fail.

As AI inference workloads are becoming part of the production workflow, organisations are going to have to ensure their infrastructure supports not just fast access but high availability, security and non-disruptive operations. Not doing this will be costly both from a results perspective and an operational perspective in terms of resource (GPUs) utilisation.

However, most organisations are still struggling with the data readiness challenge. Getting data AI-ready requires going through many phases such as data ingestion, curation, transformation, vectorisation, indexing and serving. Each of these phases can typically take days or weeks and delay the point when the AI project’s results can be evaluated. Organisations who care about using AI with their own data will focus on streamlining and automating the whole data pipeline for AI, not just for faster initial results evaluation but also for continuous ingestion of newly created data and iteration.

AI and data sovereignty will drive massive cloud repatriation

Through 2025, the Middle East saw some of the world’s largest AI investment announcements, from national AI models to sovereign hyperscale partnerships. These highlighted how deeply the region is prioritising local control over digital infrastructure and data governance. The dual issues of AI and data sovereignty are driving concerns about where data is stored, and how organisations can maintain trust and guarantee access in the event of any issues. In order to extract value from AI, it’s critical for organisations to know where their most important data is and that it’s ready for use.

Adding to this are concerns about data sovereignty which are driving more organisations to reconsider their cloud strategy. Rising geopolitical tensions and regulatory pressure will shape nations’ data centre strategies in 2026 to combat this. Governments in particular want to minimise the risk that access to data could be used as a threat or negotiating tactic. Organisations should be similarly wary and prepare themselves.

Kubevirt will take off in production at a large scale

Many customers are adopting alternatives to VMware. Kubevirt provides one platform which encompasses both virtualisation and containerisation needs, and I expect it will take off in 2026. The Kubevirt offering has also matured to the point where it’s suitable for enterprise needs. For many, moving to another virtualisation provider is a huge upheaval, and while it will save money in the short term, it is unlikely to provide access to the features needed in the long term. Kubevirt provides better control and organisations can quickly realise the value in a platform which provides the capabilities to manage, orchestrate and monitor containers.

From Experimentation to Action

Taken together, these trends signal a year in which organisations shift from experimentation to much more intentional execution. The industry is moving towards smarter infrastructure choices, clearer metrics, stronger sovereignty and more mature AI strategies. For those willing to adapt, 2026 offers enormous opportunities to build systems that are not only resilient and efficient, but genuinely transformative. It marks the beginning of a more sustainable, more secure and more strategically confident era of technology innovation