- May 22, 2026
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From charting the rise of robotaxis to quantifying the emerging market for curing diseases, AI is at the heart of this year’s Big Ideas report — an annual publication designed to identify the technologies reshaping the global economy, from St. Petersburg-based ARK Invest Management.
The report was big enough, too, where it was center stage at two major tech events this week: the PoweredUp Tampa Bay Tech Festival held at the Mahaffey Theater Wednesday and the ARK Big Ideas Summit hosted the following day by startup incubator spARK Labs by Ark Invest at St. Petersburg’s ARK Innovation Center.
This year’s Big Ideas report is the 10th annual edition of ARK Invest’s flagship research product, which categorizes and charts emerging technologies into five innovation platforms: artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, multiomics biology and blockchain.
Technologies in these major innovative platforms are “transforming the global economy and are uniquely positioned to do so over the next 10 to 20 years,” Ark Invest’s Chief Futurist Brett Winton told audience Wednesday.
“The one way we think about this is we’re going to undergo a great acceleration and, in fact, we’re just at the initial stages of that acceleration,” Winton says. “That acceleration will be felt in the way you live your lives and how your businesses grow and the underlying rate of macroeconomic growth.”
Winton and his research team predict that the investments made in AI software and agents in the next few decades will surpass the investments made in the railroads in the late 1800s, marking a historic investment cycle just now beginning.
An acceleration in one technology is more than likely to lead to an acceleration in another in the AI age. Perhaps the most profound example highlighted in the Big Ideas 2026 report is the rate at which SpaceX have made reusable rockets an accessible reality over the past year.
It used to cost about $10,000 per kilogram to get into orbit, Winton says, but with the Falcon 9 reusable rocket it now costs around $700 per kilogram. And with the Starship, which launched on Thursday, Ark Invest’s report estimates it cost under $100 per kilogram to orbit.
The reusable rockets allowed SpaceX to launch Starlink, which allows customers to get internet connectivity anywhere on earth, Winton says. And the Starlight Constellation is underwriting the launch vehicle that delivers mass to orbit at such a low cost that its economically feasible to soon “literally launch data centers into space.”
“Suddenly, a data center that’s in orbit becomes cost competitive with a data center on the ground,” Winton says. “And there’s not a lot of decay to the demand utility curve for intelligence.”
According to the report, the investment in data centers will cross $1.4 trillion by 2031 and that’s only expected to increase.
AI and data usage is exploding, Winton says — Google announced this week at its annual conference that it now processes more than 3.2 quadrillion tokens of data per month, marking a seven-fold increase in AI usage compared to last year. Now, roughly 20% of smartphone users globally — a little more than one in five people — are using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini.
That proliferation is happening almost twice as fast as users adopted the internet, Winton says. And the adoption of artificial intelligence will transform every sector, impact every business, and catalyze every innovation platform.
“That’s like the flywheel that’s spinning at the center of the technological landscape right now,” Winton says. “AI is accelerating everything … and that’s causing an investment cycle to occur that is literally without precedent, at least since the late 1800s and the steam engine.”
The changes will come fast, Winton and his research team predict. Robotaxis, or autonomous vehicles that drive themselves, are expected to become commonplace in major cities across the globe by next year, as are drone delivery robots and, in a few more years’ time, more humanoid robots that can complete household tasks.
ARK Invest research analyst Daniel Maguire told the audience at the ARK Big Ideas Summit Thursday that the autonomous logistics industry could “approach a $500 billion revenue opportunity” by the end of the decade, while digital assets, such as bitcoin, could reach $28 trillion in market value in 2030.
This technological revolution should lead to a major increase in real GDP growth, the report says — ARK Invests forecasts that the global GDP will increase by 7.3% by 2030.
Multinomics research analyst Shea Wihlborg, also speaking at the ARK Big Ideas Summit, said health innovations that treat and cure illnesses, extend human lifespan and improve quality of life could be a “$1.2 quadrillion” opportunity in the U.S. alone.
Technological advancements in the medical field have caused the cost of collecting multinomic data to drop significantly in recent years, Wihlborg says. By 2030, ARK Invest predicts the cost to sequence the entire human genome could drop roughly 10-fold to $10, making it easier for scientists to collect the data that leads to medical breakthroughs.
“People talk about the world of abundance and I do think that is the era that we’re continuing into,” Winton says. “And so then what are people going to do with all this abundance and wealth? They’re probably going to try to live forever.”
