The State of AI Report 2026 – The Official Publication of Dubai AI Festival 2026

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If 2023 was the year of AI awakening and 2024 was the year of acceleration, 2026 is the year of institutional reckoning. The central question facing global business is no longer whether models can generate answers, but whether enterprise architecture, energy grids, and capital allocations can support them at scale. While over 60% of enterprises have deployed or expanded AI tools across core functions and 1 in 6 people globally now interact with generative AI, only a small minority of organizations report more than a 5% impact on EBIT. The bottleneck is no longer raw intelligence, but execution, data integration, and physical capacity. The State of AI 2026 delivers an authoritative, data-backed assessment of this transition. From the $630 billion annual hyperscaler CapEx boom and data center power grids absorbing 8% of all new global electricity capacity by 2030, to the shift from copilots to autonomous agentic systems, this special report outlines where value is accruing—and which institutions are building the substrate for the next decade of intelligence.