These Are the 9 Absolute Filthiest Places on a Cruise Ship
These Are the 9 Absolute Filthiest Places on a Cruise Ship
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Experts weigh in on how to avoid picking up germs on your next cruise ship.
Fun, joyful images of happy cruise passengers without a care in the world can mask the dangers lurking throughout the ship. Most passengers return rested, relaxed, and perfectly healthy. However, before setting sail, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the dirtiest places on a cruise ship so you don’t end up quarantined in your cabin.
The risk of getting sick on a cruise ship is so high because so many people are confined to the same enclosed space for an extended period of time, explains Dr. Daniel Egan, an infectious disease specialist with Orlando Health Medical Group in Florida.
Norovirus, Influenza, RSV, Human Metapneumovirus, COVID-19, and Legionnaires disease are just some of the health ailments that can befall cruise-goers, Dr. Egan adds.
“Even a small number of sick passengers can expose hundreds or thousands of others in a short time,” says Dr. William Woo, a family medicine doctor with Kaiser Permanente in Southern California. Viruses in particular spread rapidly through cruise ships because many can survive on hard surfaces for days, he says. “This is why some outbreaks continue from one voyage to the next despite thorough cleaning,” Dr. Woo explains.
Some passengers try to reduce their risk by travelling outside of our normal cold and flu season, but that doesn’t necessarily help, Dr. Egan says. “They need to keep in mind that cruises include international crew and passengers, who could easily be from areas that still have these viruses circulating. For example, southern hemisphere countries would have their cold and flu season from April through September.”
However, if you are considering canceling your cruise because you are worried about getting sick, don’t ask for a refund just yet.
“None of this is to say that people should be afraid to go on cruises. They should simply be more aware of their environment,” Dr. Egan explains. “The number one way to combat all of these infections would be diligent hand hygiene.”
What Can You Do to Stay Healthy?
Simple soap and water go a long way towards protecting your health on a cruise ship.
“Wash your hands often with soap and warm water, especially before eating,” Dr. Woo advises. Moreover, while hand sanitizer is convenient and can help. “Don’t count on hand sanitizer alone as it doesn’t reliably kill all viruses and bacteria,” he adds. And don’t forget to avoid touching your face after touching shared surfaces, recommends Dr. Woo.
You can also check your cruise line’s safety score before booking, suggests Jason R. Margulies, a partner and Maritime Attorney at Lipcon, Margulies and Winkleman P.A., which has offices nationwide.
“If you’re worried about cleanliness on your cruise, I suggest you look at the inspection scores for your ship, which are conducted randomly twice each year. Scores of 86 or above are passing, and this information is available to the public,” Margulies explains.
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Hot Tubs
Hot tubs are the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. The combination of warm water, moisture, and organic material, such as skin cells, can pose a health threat, Dr. Woo explains.
“Hot tubs on cruise ships have been previously linked to Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks, a severe form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria,” he says. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell whether a cruise ship’s hot tub is safe to use. “Even when the water looks clean, harmful bacteria can still be present, and the steam can carry bacteria into the lungs when inhaled,” Dr. Woo says.
If you think booking a cabin with a private hot tub is the answer, that’s not necessarily true. According to Dr. Woo, public hot tubs on ships are usually a safer bet because private or balcony hot tubs may not be tested or disinfected as frequently as hot tubs in public areas.
If you are on the fence about using a cruise ship’s hot tub, don’t be shy about asking when it was last cleaned, Margulies says.
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Buffets
Cruise ships are synonymous with buffets. Everyone needs to eat, but cruisers should approach buffets with caution.
“Buffets involve shared utensils like tongs, spoons, and condiment handles that are touched by
numerous people in a short period of time. If even one person has early symptoms of a stomach bug like
norovirus, those germs can quickly contaminate food and surfaces,” Dr. Woo explains.
Many cruise ships force all passengers to wash their hands before hitting the buffet to minimize risks, but it’s not foolproof. Washing your hands or using hand sanitizer after loading up your plate but before eating can help.
However, even diligent hand washing may not be enough. The food served at cruise ship buffets poses its own risks, Margulies says.
“It is commonly stored at unsafe temperatures,” he explains. If you are still concerned, stick to onboard restaurants that serve plated meals, Margulies suggests.
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Public Restrooms
Public restrooms on cruise ships get a lot of traffic.
“Viruses like norovirus can spread easily through shared surfaces like faucets, flush handles, and doorknobs, especially if handwashing is rushed or skipped,” Margulies says.
Because you can’t control whether other passengers wash after using the toilet, it’s important to wash your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds every time you use a public restroom. I usually follow up with a dose of hand sanitizer just in case! If I am close enough to my cabin, I will sometimes head back to use my own bathroom instead.
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Handrails
High-touch surfaces throughout cruise ships can become filthy.
“Even with regular cleaning, they can become contaminated again within a few minutes,” Dr. Woo explains.
Handrails on cruise ships are touched frequently throughout the day for good reason. Ships can rock, and holding onto handrails is often necessary to prevent falls. I would never skip holding onto a handrail on a cruise ship, but I always use hand sanitizer when I get to my destination and wash my hands as soon as possible.
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Elevator Buttons
Elevator buttons are another high-touch area on cruise ships. Because cruise ship elevators get so much traffic, their buttons tend to become contaminated quickly after cleaning. An easy fix is to use your elbow to push elevator buttons. I’ve also seen some people on cruise ships carry a napkin to cover their fingers before pressing elevator buttons. Nothing is foolproof but reducing how much of your skin comes into contact with germs can help.
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Casino Chips
If you gamble, watch out for casino chips. These chips may pass through dozens of hands daily, but they are probably not disinfected regularly, Dr. Woo says.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try your hand with Lady Luck during your cruise. You can minimize your risk by avoiding touching your face while in the ship’s casino and, of course, washing your hands well after you leave.
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Self-Serve Drink Machines
Self-serve drink machines on cruise ships tend to get a lot of use. They are rarely cleaned and are usually near food services, which are another hot spot for infection, Dr. Egan explains.
Many people use their dirty hands to push buttons on the machines, Egan says. Other times, people press their used cups on the machine for a refill.
“Additionally, if people overfill their drinks, spill on their hands, and don’t wash their hands and then touch the buttons again, that could be a possible infectious source,” he explains. If you are worried, stick to drink stations where a staff member fills your cup for you.
PHOTO: LukeOnTheRoad/Shutterstock
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Door Handles
Door handles are another high-touch area on cruise ships that are hard to keep clean due to frequent use, Dr. Egan says. These “could be harboring viruses or bacteria,” he explains. If you can, use your elbow to open doors. Or find a way to cover your hand before touching a door handle; by pulling the edge of your T-shirt over your palm or covering your hand with a paper towel you keep in your pocket. If all else fails, you can wait for someone else to open the door and then follow them through.
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Passenger Cabins
You may think that you are safe from germs in your own cabin, but you would be wrong. “The remote control and phone are commonly forgotten by cleaning staff,” Margulies says.
Other high-touch areas in cabins, such as light switches and bathroom fixtures like faucets and shower handles, also pose a risk, Dr. Woo adds.
However, unlike public areas of cruise ships, it’s easier to combat risks within your cabin.
“In your own room, you can wipe down any of those light switches and other concerning spots as soon as you arrive,” Margulies recommends.
The race takes off in the next big arenas of competition
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/the-race-takes-off-in-the-next-big-arenas-of-competition?
By
In the arenas, investment cycles are accelerating, value pools are shifting, and a new type of competitor is scaling across industries.
Chapter 2
Arenas are reshaping the industrial landscape
This chapter examines the 18 future arenas and explores the themes that are driving outsize growth. Here we find that AI is increasingly emerging at the heart of the new arenas landscape.
Five themes reveal differences in future arenas
In this chapter, we group the 18 future arenas into five themes to make broader patterns easier to spot. The five themes are: AI foundation, digitization, electrification, hard tech, and new bio-frontiers.
We define the AI foundation as semiconductors, cloud services, and AI software and services—the companies that are driving artificial intelligence across industries. Digitization encompasses e-commerce, digital advertising, video games, streaming video, and cybersecurity; electrification represents nuclear, EVs, and batteries; hard tech accounts for robotics, shared autonomous vehicles, future air mobility, space, and modular construction; and new bio-frontiers covers non-medical biotech and obesity drugs. Across all clusters and themes, AI often acts as an accelerator by improving performance, lowering costs, and enabling technology resets.
These categories are an analytical simplification: Cloud services are hardly AI-only, digitization continues to drive heavy demand, and semiconductors power far more than cloud operations. We nevertheless group semiconductors and cloud in the AI foundation because this arrangement best correlates with the underlying trends driving the dynamics. Similarly, some arenas within a theme are more related than others. For example, a subset of hard tech—including shared autonomous vehicles, future air mobility, and new robotics—can also be viewed as physical AI, or systems built to “sense, think, and act” in the real world, thanks to sophisticated sensors and other AI-enabled technologies, while space and modular construction are less related. Keeping this caveat in mind, the five themes are used as the organizing frame for the analysis that follows.
Since 2022, the future arenas have added about $18 trillion in market cap and $1.4 trillion in revenue. But note that these gains are highly concentrated by theme. Of the $18 trillion in incremental market cap, the AI foundation accounts for $11 trillion (about 60 percent of the total), with the digitization theme contributing an additional $5 trillion. Of the $1.4 trillion in revenue growth, digitization contributes $700 billion (nearly half), with the AI foundation bringing in $500 billion and electrification roughly $200 billion. Hard tech and new bio-frontiers are the themes that include more arenas that are earlier on the S-curve.
An AI wave is rising atop a still-surging digital wave
The AI foundation is clearly the fastest-growing category by market value, boosted by rising valuations of private leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The AI foundation’s share of total market value in our universe of large companies doubled from about 6 percent in 2022 to about 13 percent by the end of 2025.
Market-cap and valuation gains are only part of the story. Revenues rose as well, but more modestly: The AI foundation’s share of revenue across industries increased from about 2 percent to about 3 percent. In absolute terms, AI foundation companies added about $11 trillion in market value on roughly $500 billion of incremental revenue.
Recent disclosures suggest that revenue momentum is building. Anthropic has stated that its run-rate revenue is growing more than tenfold annually and is now about $14 billion. Nvidia’s revenues expanded rapidly, from $27 billion in fiscal 2023 to more than $200 billion for fiscal 2026, implying that revenues have nearly doubled on average each year over the period.
Nevertheless, the gap between market-cap and revenue growth reflects investor expectations for the future, expectations that will ultimately need to be validated through sustained returns on invested capital above the cost of capital. Whether the current AI investment cycle will generate returns commensurate with the capital deployed is among the most consequential open questions in business. Forty percent of market-cap growth is explained by Nvidia’s valuation climbing by roughly $4 trillion from 2022 to 2025 as the company added $170 billion in revenues. At the close of 2025, Nvidia alone was worth more than the entire listed semiconductor industry in 2022.
Similar growth in the AI foundation is visible in investment. The AI foundation’s share of total capital expenditures and R&D rose by about three percentage points (from 11 percent to 14 percent), accounting for much of the overall increase in future arenas’ investment share (from 23 percent to 28 percent) and roughly matching the rise in digitization (from 7 percent to 10 percent).
Escalatory investment is a core ingredient in the arena-creation potion, and in the current cycle, AI demand is amplifying it, particularly through spending on computing power in the form of data centers and semiconductors. Among a small set of seven companies (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, TSMC, Oracle, and Nvidia) with businesses in the AI foundation theme and outsize R&D and capital expenditures, total investment escalated from about $15 billion in 2005 to close to $750 billion in 2025—50 times higher over two decades, and more than 90 percent above the level in 2022. To gauge the magnitude, $750 billion represents about 11 percent of total US federal outlays in fiscal year 2025 and exceeds total public spending on US transportation and water infrastructure in 2023. Another way to look at it is as more than two entire Apollo programs per year (in today’s dollars)—and the Apollo project took 13 years.
Most of those companies have announced sharp increases in capital investment for 2026. Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon have each indicated 2026 capital expenditures exceeding $100 billion, and each implies an increase of more than 50 percent over 2025. If current forecasts hold, the seven companies’ combined R&D and capital expenditures could be close to $1 trillion in 2026, more than 30 percent above 2025’s level.
So far, realized economic value in the AI and chip value chain has been unevenly distributed, with a significant share accruing to chip designers (notably Nvidia), foundries, and hyperscale cloud providers that can deploy and monetize computing power at scale. At the same time, profit pools remain dynamic. Even between 2024 and 2025, value creation has shifted across segments alongside overall growth—for example, with a recent increase in memory.
Within semiconductors, Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely used for training many state-of-the-art AI models. High demand is reinforced by Nvidia’s CUDA programming model and its deep library stack, which makes GPUs easier to program and keeps workloads highly optimized across AI frameworks. This ecosystem integration can increase switching costs and helps explain Nvidia’s industry-leading gross profit margins of approximately 75 percent in 2025, though the company expects a lower margin in 2026.
Leading-edge chip manufacturing also holds large value. TSMC’s foundries operate at relatively high gross margins (approximately 60 percent), reflecting the scarcity of advanced capacity. Further upstream in the AI value chain, margins vary widely. ASML’s gross margins sit at about 50 to 53 percent. Other segments show more variability in performance. In memory, for example, players are seeing steep increases in profits and cash. For example, Micron’s gross margin was about 22 percent in fiscal 2024 and rose to about 40 percent in fiscal 2025, swinging from a loss in fiscal 2023 to positive net income in fiscal 2024 as performance improved. Among hyperscalers, gross margins are relatively high compared with the rest of the chain; for example, Microsoft Cloud reported a gross margin of about 69 percent in 2025, though it noted margin headwinds from scaling AI infrastructure.
Looking ahead, it is uncertain where margins will concentrate next as the AI value chain evolves. Will they accrue to new AI software players as their platforms scale and reach widespread adoption, or will those models become commoditized? Will profits remain anchored with chip designers and other hardware leaders? Different scenarios paint very different pictures of how value will be generated and distributed in the future, and while the answer is not yet clear, the question remains one of the most exciting (see sidebar “Investment moves across the AI value chain to address key constraints”.
Digitization is supercharged by AI and emerging markets
The digitization theme was the second-largest contributor to growth after the AI foundation. For the five digital arenas that make up this theme, revenue rose by 10 percent a year from 2022 to 2025, often from an already large base. Meanwhile, market caps continued compounding double-digit gains through 2025 (growing about 10 to 12 percent per year in e-commerce and video games, and roughly 20 to 24 percent per year in cybersecurity, digital advertising, and streaming video).
Global industries, with well-known incumbents and sizable annual revenues, can make digitization look mature at first glance. Several arenas have moved from rapid adoption to scale economics, where gains come from monetization and efficiency rather than growth in first-time users. Streaming video illustrates the shift: After a decade of subscriber-led expansion, many leading platforms are now emphasizing profitability through pricing, bundling, and ad-supported tiers and are competing more directly with one another.
Yet the digitization arenas continue to be reshaped by successive waves of disruption, which are still propagating through business models and market structure. Arena boundaries are blurring as firms compete for scarce attention, LLM-led interfaces are changing how online content is accessed, and emerging markets are adding to demand as even more households come online.
McKinsey’s 2025 report The ‘attention equation’ shows how the digitization arenas are interlinked. Industry boundaries are defined not only by products and services but by a scarce, valuable input—consumer attention. Attention, understood as valuable time spent and shaped by focus and intent, varies in monetizable potential, with higher-intent engagement commanding greater value (see sidebar “E-commerce and games in the battle for attention”). Consequently, digital players are moving fluidly up and down the value chain and across the digitization arenas. Content-led digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram are moving downstream into commerce. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime are scaling ad-supported business models. Legacy ad and search players like Google are shifting more spending toward video feeds, with YouTube accounting for more than 12 percent of all TV viewing in the United States in May 2025 and much of that attention captured by independent creators rather than traditional media studios. At the same time, multiple offline brands are building in-house digital-media capabilities to produce their own content. The result is a set of increasingly integrated ecosystems competing to control customer attention, transactions, and the data that connect them.
In this dynamic context, AI is creating disruptions across digital media. Chatbots that can return detailed, useful responses to complex user queries are disintermediating the open-web journey, reducing click-through traffic from searches at the expense of the publishers that rely on them. In advertising, AI is compressing creative cycles and enabling increasingly automated, real-time targeting and bidding. It also risks upending established content creation practices, with the potential to accelerate a shift to user-generated content and democratize access to high-end content creation—or generate a tidal wave of worthless AI slop.Meanwhile, movie and video game studios are already using AI to save costs in development and preproduction, even as debates over creative talent displacement, IP rights, and AI bias intensify.
Agentic commerce could become the next major reset in digitization by unbundling the integrated ecosystems many companies have spent a decade building. Firms are getting better at monetizing attention, data, and transactions within tightly integrated environments, yet the same AI innovation race may erode those advantages by shifting digital journeys from “browse and choose” to “delegate and execute.” If AI agents become the default front door for discovery and purchasing, control could move from today’s platforms to whoever runs that agent experience and sets its defaults—whether operating systems, marketplaces, model providers, or payment platforms—recasting customer access, demand steering, and value capture across the digital stack.
Cybersecurity is an arena where AI is already raising both risk and demand, making security for AI and AI for security twin priorities. As organizations embed AI into their systems, the attack surface expands as new models, APIs, data pipelines, and third-party integrations create additional components and decision points to secure. At the same time, attackers can use AI to facilitate phishing, impersonation, payload delivery, and exploit discovery. Continuing the loop, corporations are deploying AI in their defense to improve detection and response. Quantum computing is also emerging as a swing factor for cybersecurity growth. The “Q-Day”—when sufficiently powerful quantum machines could break today’s widely used public-key encryption—can accelerate investment in quantum-safe cryptography and quantum-secure communications. Regulation is also lifting cybersecurity’s baseline. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, US regulators’- and state-level cybersecurity requirements, and emerging AI-safety standards are among the measures that encourage more corporate spending on identity and access management, cloud security, data protection, and other cybersecurity offerings. And multiplying attacker capabilities are only one vector of cybersecurity risk from AI. Agentic systems that operate across applications may require broad, ongoing access to devices and sensitive data, expanding attack surfaces and straining established identity, governance, and privacy safeguards.
Amid these shifts, emerging markets remain core engines for growth as their addressable bases expand. Two main drivers of this growth are increasing connectivity, with more people online, and easier monetization with digital payments, particularly in Southeast Asia and parts of the Middle East and North Africa region. In Southeast Asia, multiple countries experienced double-digit annual growth of e-commerce’s gross merchandise value between 2023 and 2024. In India, e-commerce has scaled rapidly, while still having considerable room for growth; only 20 to 25 percent of Indian internet users shop online.
E-commerce is increasingly crossing borders, despite some tightening of trade rules. This global interconnectivity is raising the competitive bar and sometimes compressing prices as companies ship large volumes internationally. Similar growth trends are visible beyond e-commerce. In video games, for example, growth is increasingly concentrated in emerging regions, including Latin America and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where large investments are backing digital ecosystem build-outs.
Electrification scales—and shifts competition to cost and efficiency
Electrification is the common driver of three future arenas: electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and nuclear fission. It reflects a broader shift from burning fuels directly—in cars, boilers, furnaces, and industrial processes—to generating, storing, and using electricity instead. As a result, electricity demand is growing faster than total energy supply, a trend further accelerated by AI’s growing power needs. Between 2022 and 2024, electricity generation rose about 3.5 percent per year to reach 31,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), almost double the 1.8 percentage points per year growth rate of total primary energy supply over the same period.
Electrification is being pulled forward by two forces: decarbonization goals and the economics of efficiency. Electric end-use technologies, as seen in EVs and heat pumps, are typically much more efficient than fossil-fuel alternatives, like internal combustion engines and gas-burning boilers. Adoption is already meaningful: 22 percent of final energy uses were electric in 2024, and the technical runway remains large. An estimated 75 percent of final energy demand could be electrified with existing technologies, though it may take decades for the hardest of those use cases to become economical.
Demand for electrification is no longer in doubt. As electricity demand grows, players are competing to build capacity at speed, secure supply chains, and sustain attractive returns. We focus on three arenas that illustrate different facets of the larger electrification story. First, EVs are among the largest and fastest-scaling sources of end-use demand. Next, batteries sit at the system’s core, enabling both mobility and power flexibility. And finally, nuclear fission can provide the reliable, always-available, low-carbon electricity the growing system increasingly needs.
Electric vehicles stand out among the three arenas for the strength and breadth of arena-creating signals as the industry scales and attention turns to efficiency. Globally, EV revenues grew by 18 percent per year from 2022 to 2025, and unit sales grew even faster. Growth, however, has been uneven, both geographically and across players. China has led the expansion, with EV sales overtaking conventional vehicle sales in mid-2025. Value creation has concentrated in a small set of scaled players; escalatory investment and intense price competition have in fact compressed returns below the cost of capital for all but a handful of participants. These dynamics, along with regional differences in EV adoption and economics, are explored further in chapter 4.
As EV sales have increased and grids have required more energy storage, demand for batteries has surged. Between 2022 and 2025, demand for lithium-ion batteries by volume more than doubled, reaching about 1.6 TWh. Battery energy storage installations alone jumped more than 50 percent globally between 2024 and 2025 to 315 GWh. Falling costs alongside growing power needs, especially from AI and data centers, are reinforcing demand. Yet industry revenues grew only about 3 percent per year from 2022 to 2025 as intense competition, overcapacity, and lower input costs put downward pressure on prices. This dynamic is accelerating consolidation and favoring players with lower production costs, secure access to minerals, and government-backed financing. Such players are often based in China. Smaller or higher-cost entrants are finding it harder to scale efficiently. In the United States and Europe, some policy tools and incentives have been aimed at improving project economics and time to scale, but as conditions change—such as shifts in demand expectations, permitting timelines, financing costs, and eligibility rules—some battery projects have been delayed, downsized, or cancelled.
Meanwhile, nuclear fission is snapping into focus as the way to provide power that is both low-carbon and available 24/7, a capability that is becoming more valuable as power demand rises, more intermittent sources (like solar and wind) are added to grids, and more countries prioritize energy independence. While near-term growth for this industry remains modest, momentum is building in both private and public sectors, supporting expectations for a stronger project pipeline. On the private side, hyperscalers are increasingly turning to nuclear; for example, Meta and Microsoft both signed 20-year power purchase agreements for a fixed-price nuclear power supply. On the public side, the number of national governments endorsing the United Nations COP pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 increased to 33 in 2025, and the US government has announced broad support for nuclear, too. Despite renewed momentum in the United States as well as in Europe, most nuclear capacity under construction is located outside of these regions. The next phase of competition is likely to be shaped by delivery capability: who can finance, permit, and build reliably at speed—and at a competitive cost. With these market forces, small modular reactors (SMRs) and nuclear microreactors could eventually broaden the field if a small number of designs achieve repeatable licensing and execution (see sidebar “From large builds to SMRs: The new field map of nuclear”).
Beyond EVs, batteries, and nuclear arenas, electrification is catalyzing a broader ecosystem, from charging and grid modernization to advanced materials and power electronics, creating conditions for additional arena formations on the horizon. For example, an electric tech stack that spans batteries, electric motors, and power electronics increasingly underpins physical innovations across our hard tech theme—robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, rockets, and more.
Hard tech is poised to take off
Arenas in the hard tech theme share a common trait: They translate advances in engineered hardware—often paired with software and AI—into new physical-world capabilities. In this report, we focus on five such arenas: robotics, shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs), future air mobility (including both electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, known as eVTOLs, and commercial drones), modular construction, and space. Together, they span how we build, move, and operate in challenging environments, from factory floors and city streets to the upper atmosphere and orbit. While many of these arenas benefit from electrification, we treat them separately because their primary drivers of value are the deployment of novel physical systems and autonomy at scale, often in combination.
Hard tech arenas are likely to change the way we experience the world. Modular construction can compress build timelines. Advances in robotics enable machines to expand from manufacturing to new fields like healthcare and agriculture. Autonomous vehicles, drones, and eVTOLs could reshape passenger mobility, delivery, and other sectors. Meanwhile, space innovation opens new horizons. Across all hard tech arenas, AI is accelerating automation and improving performance.
On the technology side, we see a convergence of three arenas in particular—robotics, SAVs, and future air mobility. In all three, advances in machine sensors, AI-based perception and decision-making, and increasingly capable actuators are allowing machines to perceive their surroundings, reason in real time, and act autonomously in the physical world. Progress in one arena is increasingly transferable to others. For example, advances in urban driving perception can lead to advances in delivery drones and warehouse robots, reinforcing innovation across the broader hard tech ecosystem.
Over the past three years, technology has advanced, investment has scaled, and demand has risen. Yet most hard tech arenas remain early stage, albeit to different degrees. Some are experiencing a renaissance as new use cases and enabling technologies emerge. For example, space, long anchored by government and telecoms, is being reshaped by new private players that are reducing launch costs and enabling new commercial services. Likewise, robotics, for decades deployed in closed-off industrial settings like assembly lines, is advancing more general-purpose applications as AI-based control improves. Robotaxis (that is, SAVs), while still relatively young, are beginning to scale in multiple cities.
Others remain in earlier stages of development: eVTOLs are progressing from certification to commercialization, drone delivery is starting to scale in select corridors, and modular construction remains a relatively slim share of the global construction market. But across the set, the question is often shifting from “Does it work?” to “Can it scale?”—with integration into real-world operations, regulations, and economics becoming decisive. The examples below illustrate that dynamic.
Driverless robotaxis are a reality on the roads in some markets. SAVs moved beyond pilots and now provide transportation for millions of people. They are commercially operating or testing in about 30 cities in the United States, China, and the United Arab Emirates. In California alone, miles traveled by robotaxis between September 2024 and September 2025 tripled, reaching almost 13 million miles (as shown in Exhibit 11). The two leading players, Waymo and Apollo Go, delivered more than 37 million rides from launch to 2025. Alphabet’s Waymo increased weekly rides by a factor of 25 in just two years. This momentum is expected to continue as safety and user acceptance improve and as capital keeps flowing. In 2024, Waymo raised an additional $5.6 billion to fund expansion, and UK-based start-up Wayve raised about $1 billion.
Even as SAVs and investment scale, the economics remain challenging. As of 2025, leading players are still losing money, and Apollo Go has reportedly reached unit-level profitability in only one city (Wuhan, China). Our estimates show that robotaxi cost per vehicle mile traveled could decrease by more than 80 percent when operating at scale. As the industry grows, operators are pushing costs down through AI-enabled performance gains, lower-cost hardware, and more efficient operations and fleet utilization. Yet the pace of that expansion relies on complex and fragmented permitting requirements, particularly in the United States and the European Union.
In another industry that once seemed more science fiction than next door, commercial delivery drones are seeing strong momentum. The number of drone deliveries rose by more than 25 percent from 2022 to 2023. Zipline, one of the arena’s leading players, doubled its deliveries from one million in April 2024 to two million by January 2026. The primary drivers of growth were quick-commerce package delivery and time-sensitive medical deliveries, with growing markets in the United States and Africa. Demand also increased in agricultural uses; in the United States, the number of registered agricultural drones increased more than fivefold in 18 months. Beyond commercial applications, defense drones are also growing with renewed investment; while we do not size military applications in our market scenarios, we discuss this trend below.
Although the drone market is growing, it remains nascent, and its economics remain challenging. Limited approvals to run uncrewed beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flights is another constraint. While some BVLOS flights are possible today, they often rely on waivers and risk mitigation, including human observers and other oversight efforts, which add labor costs and confine operations to small geographies. Clearer, scalable BVLOS rules would enable longer routes and hub-and-spoke networks, improving the business case for delivery and other applications. In the United States, proposals to ease regulation are underway.
Also within future air mobility, eVTOLs are even more nascent. There are indications that they are approaching operating approvals, but commercialization is still in the distance (see sidebar “Hover, transition, certify: What still stands between eVTOLs and scale”).
These examples highlight a common pattern in hard tech: Most arenas show strong progress on potion elements (technological progress, investment, and market expansion) but are only beginning the journey to commercial scale. The pace of pickup will hinge on how the potion elements evolve. New demand drivers could emerge. AI expansion could propel modular construction for data centers; defense needs could expand (see sidebar “How defense is driving demand across hard tech). Regulation will also be decisive. Clearer rules and faster permitting can unlock deployment, and targeted public support can galvanize private investment.
Along new bio-frontiers, non-medical biotech remains nascent while obesity drugs ramp up
Biotechnology is entering a new era. New tools to read, write, and edit biological elements are expanding what can be designed and built with living systems. More precise gene editing is enabling resilient crops. Microbes can now act as miniature factories to produce biomaterials, such as renewable and lower-carbon plastics known as bioplastics. Biotechnology is accelerating medical research, from novel weight-loss treatments to gene and cell therapies.
Two arenas capture much of this frontier activity: drugs for obesity (and related conditions) and non-medical biotechnology, the latter of which spans alternative proteins, agricultural biotechnology, consumer products and services, and biomaterials and biochemicals. While innovation advances across both, the two arenas are moving at uneven paces.
Non-medical biotech is progressing more gradually in an array of industrial and consumer segments, especially in alternative proteins (including lab-grown meat and precision fermentation) and advances in agricultural biotechnology (for instance, using CRISPR gene editing to modify crops). Several industrial biotech segments remain in the earlier stages in commercialization and are dependent on end-markets economics. For instance, slower growth and margin pressure in agriculture is delaying the adoption of new biotech seeds, despite strong scientific progress. Still, underlying demand drivers support long-term potential, even if near-term commercialization is uneven.
By contrast, obesity drugs are scaling rapidly and exhibit many of the characteristics of a full-fledged arena. From 2022 to 2025, the market expanded significantly; revenues increased by more than 30 percent per year following a surge in demand. In the United States, GLP-1 prescriptions are now more than six out of every 100 prescriptions, a number that increased sixfold over the past five years. In several European countries, the out-of-pocket market roughly doubled over a single year. While the market remains concentrated, led by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, competitive intensity is rising, with more than 80 companies pursuing obesity treatments in 2025. Many competitors, including Boehringer Ingelheim, Amgen, AstraZeneca, and Roche, have late-stage obesity programs or assets. Entrants are also investing via M&A and differentiated technologies. For instance, Pfizer acquired GLP-1 producer Metsera for about $10 billion in 2025.
Demand could increase as penetration remains low and access expands. As of 2024, only about 3 percent of US adults deemed eligible had received a prescription for weight-loss medications, and affordability remains a barrier because payer coverage is limited in markets such as the United States and the United Kingdom. At the same time, prices have dropped in recent years (by 25 to 40 percent in the United States), and upcoming key patent expirations could bring lower-cost generics and expand access.
Competition is further reshaping how novel weight-loss therapies reach patients. Companies are developing oral alternatives to injections and longer-acting regimens to cut dosing frequency and improve persistence. Incumbents are also testing new commercial models to capture the growing out-of-pocket market. Novo Nordisk and Lilly have launched direct-to-consumer platforms, NovoCare and LillyDirect, offering telehealth and home delivery. These new channels are already meaningful for sales. For Lilly, about 35 percent of Zepbound prescriptions in the second quarter of 2025 were filled through LillyDirect. Moreover, both Novo Nordisk and Lilly introduced substantial discounts for patients paying out of pocket in 2025.
The growth of novel weight-loss therapies could reshape more than pharmaceutical sales, especially if consumer-oriented care models and their spillovers, spread into adjacent parts of the healthcare system (see sidebar “Obesity drugs could trigger a more expansive health reset”). These types of therapies also reflect a broader shift within biotech. As scientific capabilities advance, innovation is increasingly focused not only on treating acute disease but also on addressing metabolic health and other chronic conditions that shape long-term outcomes. One area of development is “healthspan” research, which seeks to better understand and influence the biological processes associated with aging. This field remains emerging and faces scientific, regulatory, and commercial hurdles, but it illustrates how biotech priorities are expanding alongside advances in data, biology, and therapeutic platforms. Together, these developments highlight the evolving scope of the biotech landscape.
Chapter 3 in next edition
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