2025-12-30 22:00:02
This year’s top semiconductor stories were mostly about the long and twisting trips a technology takes from idea (or even raw material) to commercial deployment. I’ve been at IEEE Spectrum long enough to have seen some of the early days of things that became commercial only this year.
In chip-making that includes the production of the next evolution of transistor design—nanosheet transistors—and the arrival of nanoimprint lithography. In optoelectronics, it was the commercialization of optical fiber links that go directly into the processor package.
Of course there were also great new technologies recently born, like growing diamond inside ICs to cool them. But there were also, unfortunately, developments that are getting in the way of moving technologies from the laboratory to the semiconductor fab.
Still, if anything, the year’s best semiconductor stories showed that technology is full of fascinating tales.
Peter Crowther
It seems one of our readers’ favorite things was this cool idea. Perhaps you read it while chilling out with a print copy of Spectrum or maybe while on your phone and icing a sore knee. (Okay. I’ll stop.) Stanford professor Srabanti Chowdhury explained how her team has come up with a way to grow diamonds inside ICs, mere nanometers from heat generating transistors. The result was radio devices that were more than 50 degrees Celsius cooler, and a pathway to integrate the highly heat-conductive material in 3D chips. The article was part of a special report on the problem of heat in computing that includes an article on cooling chips with lasers and other great reads.
Left: Stefan Ziegenbalg; Right: ASML
This one had a little bit of everything. It’s the story of how ASML figured out a key unknown in the development of one of the most crucial (and craziest) contraptions in technology today, the light source for extreme ultraviolet lithography. But it’s also a sweet story of a man and his grandfather—but with supernovas, atomic bomb blasts, high-powered lasers, and a cameo by computer pioneer John von Neumann.
Mingrui Ao, Xiucheng Zhou et al.
In past years, we’ve reported plenty about advances in making individual 2D transistors work well. But in April we delivered a story of some 2D semiconductor integration heroics. Researchers in China managed to integrate nearly 6,000 molybdenum disulfide devices to make a RISC-V processor. Amazingly, despite using just laboratory-level manufacturing, the chip’s creators achieve a 99.7 percent yield of good transistors.
Canon
Our Japan correspondent, John Boyd, described an exciting potential competitor to EUV lithography. Canon announced that it had sold the first nanoimprint lithography system for chip making. Instead of carrying the chip’s features as a pattern of light, this machine literally stamps them onto the silicon. It’s a technology that’s been decades in the making. In fact, one of my first reporting trips for IEEE Spectrum was to visit a startup using nanoimprint lithography to make specialized optics. I got in a minor car accident on my way there and never got to see the tech in person. But if you want a look, there’s one in Austin, Texas.
IEEE Spectrum; Source image: Natcast
The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act promised to be transformational—not just for chip manufacturing, but for providing R&D and infrastructure that would help close the dreaded lab-to-fab gap that captures and kills so many interesting ideas. The main vehicle for that R&D and infrastructure was the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a legally mandated, US $7.4 billion program to be administered by a public-private partnership. But the Commerce Department ended the latter entity, called Natcast, in late Summer. The vitriol with which it was done shocked many chip experts. Now Commerce has killed another CHIPS Act center, the SMART USA Institute, which was dedicated to digital twins for chip manufacturing.
Nvidia
The idea of bringing speedy, low-power optical interconnects all the way to the processor has fired the imagination of engineers for years. But high cost, low-reliability, and serious engineering issues have kept it from happening. This year we saw the first hint that it was really coming. Broadcom and Nvidia—separately—developed optical transceivers integrated in the same package as network switch chips, which sling data from server rack to server rack inside data centers.
IEEE Spectrum
TSMC and Intel have begun manufacturing new types of transistors, called nanosheets or gate-all-around. We got the first look at what this means for shrinking the next generation of logic chips when both companies reported details of SRAM memory for such new chips. Amazingly, both companies produced memory cells exactly as small as each other right down to the nanometer. Even more amazingly, Synopsys designed a cell using the previous generation of transistors that hit that density as well, but they didn’t perform nearly as well.
Optics Lab
2025-12-30 21:00:02
Charging an EV at home doesn’t seem like an inconvenience—until you find yourself dragging a cord around a garage or down a rainy driveway, then unplugging and coiling it back up every time you drive the kids to school or run an errand. For elderly or disabled drivers, those bulky cords can be a physical challenge.
As it was for smartphones years ago, wireless EV charging has been the dream. But there’s a difference of nearly four orders of magnitude between the roughly 14 watt-hours of a typical smartphone battery and that of a large EV. That’s what makes the wireless charging on the 108-kilowatt-hour pack in the forthcoming Porsche Cayenne Electric so notable.
To offer the first inductive charger on a production car, Porsche had to overcome both technical and practical challenges—such as how to protect a beloved housecat prowling below your car. The German automaker demonstrated the system at September’s IAA Mobility show in Munich.
With its 800-volt architecture, the Cayenne Electric can charge at up to 400 kW at a public DC station, enough to fill its pack from 10 to 80 percent in about 16 minutes. The wireless system delivers about 11 kW for Level 2 charging at home, where Porsche says three out of four of its customers do nearly all their fill-ups. Pull the Cayenne into a garage and align it over a floor-mounted plate, and the SUV will charge from 10 to 80 percent in about 7.5 hours. No plugs, tangled cords, or dirty hands. Porsche will offer a single-phase, 48-ampere version for the United States after buyers see their first Cayennes in mid-2026, and a three-phase, 16-A system in Europe.
The concept of inductive charging has been around for more than a century. Two coils of copper wire are positioned near one another. A current flowing through one coil creates a magnetic field, which induces voltage in the second coil.
In the Porsche system, the floor-mounted pad, 78 centimeters wide, plugs into the home’s electrical panel. Inside the pad, which weighs 50 kilograms, grid electricity (at 60 hertz in the United States, 50 Hz in most of the rest of the world) is converted to DC and then to high-frequency AC at 2,000 V.The resulting 85-kilohertz magnetic field extends from the pad to the Cayenne, where it is converted again to DC voltage.
The waterproof pad can also be placed outdoors, and the company says it’s unaffected by leaves, snow, and the like. In fact, the air-cooled pad can get warm enough to melt any snow, reaching temperatures as high as 50 °C.
The Cayenne’s onboard charging hardware mounts between its front electric motor and battery. The 15-kg induction unit wires directly into the battery.
In most EVs, plug-in (conductive) AC charging tops out at around 95 percent efficiency. Porsche says its wireless system delivers 90 percent efficiency, despite an air gap of roughly 12 to 18 cm between the pad and vehicle.
Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory transferred an impressive 270 kilowatts to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency.
“We’re super proud that we’re just below conductive AC in charging efficiency,” says Simon Schulze, Porsche’s product manager for charging hardware. Porsche also beats inductive phone chargers, which typically max out at about 70 percent efficiency, Schulze says.
When the car gets within 7.5 meters of the charging pad, the Cayenne’s screen-based parking-assist system turns on automatically. Then comes a kind of video game that requires the driver to align a pair of green circles on-screen, one representing the car, the other the pad. It’s like a digital version of the tennis ball some people hang in their garage to gauge parking distance. There’s ample wiggle room, with tolerances of 20 cm left to right, and 15 cm fore and aft. “You can’t miss it,” according to Schulze.
Induction loops detect any objects between the charging plate and the vehicle; such objects, if they’re metal, could heat up dangerously. Radar sensors detect any living things near the pad, and will halt the charging if necessary. People can walk near the car or hop aboard without affecting a charging session.
Christian Holler, Porsche’s head of charging systems, says the system conforms to International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection standards for electromagnetic radiation. The field remains below 15 microteslas, so it’s safe for people with pacemakers, Porsche insists. And the aforementioned cat wouldn’t be harmed even if it strayed into the magnetic field, though “its metal collar might get warm,” Schulze says.
The Porsche system’s 90 percent efficiency is impressive but not record-setting. Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) transferred 270 kW to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency, boosting its state of charge by 50 percent in 10 minutes. That world-record wireless rate relied on polyphase windings for coils, part of a U.S. Department of Energy project that was backed by Volkswagen, Porsche’s parent company.
That effort, Holler says, spawned a Ph.D. paper from VW engineer Andrew Foote. Yet the project had different goals from the one that led to the Cayenne charging system. ORNL was focused on maximum power transfer, regardless of cost, production feasibility, or reliability, he says.
By contrast, designing a system for showroom cars “requires a completely different level of quality and processes,” Holler says.
Cayenne buyers in Europe will pay around €7,000 (roughly US $8,100) for the optional charger. Porsche has yet to price it for the United States.
Loren McDonald, chief executive of Chargeonomics, an EV-charging analysis firm, said wireless charging “is clearly the future,” with use cases such as driverless robotaxis, curbside charging, or at any site “where charging cables might be an annoyance or even a safety issue.”
But for now, inductive charging’s costly, low-volume status will limit it to niche models and high-income adopters, McDonald says. Public adoption will be critical “so that drivers can convenience-charge throughout their driving day—which then increases the benefits of spending more money on the system.”
Porsche acknowledges that issue; the system conforms to wireless standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that other automakers might help popularize the technology.
“We didn’t want this to be proprietary, a Porsche-only solution,” Schulze says. “We only benefit if other brands use it.”
2025-12-29 22:00:02
Powering the AI data center boom dominated the conversation in the global energy sector in 2025. Governments are racing to develop the most advanced AI models, and data center developers are building as fast as they can. But no one is going to get very far without finding ways to generate and move more electricity to these power guzzlers.
Spectrum’s most popular energy stories in 2025 centered around that theme. Readers were particularly interested in stories about next-generation nuclear power, such as small modular reactors and salt-cooled reactors, and how those technologies might support data centers. Readers also turned to Spectrum to learn about the strain all of this is putting on electricity grids, and new technologies to solve those problems.
Despite the weightiness of the energy sector’s challenges, we found some fun, off-beat stories to tell too. One American company is building the world’s largest airplane—it’s bigger than a football field—and it will have one job: to transport wind turbine blades.
I don’t know what 2026 will bring, but as Spectrum’s energy editor, I’ll do my best to provide you stories that are true, useful, and engaging. Cheers to a new year in energy!
GE Vernova
The world suddenly needs more power, but one solution being tested is to downsize energy generation and distribute it more widely. One example of that is small modular reactors (SMRs). These nuclear fission reactors are less than a third of the size and power output of conventional reactors. And as the April deadline approached for applying for the US $900 million the United States was offering for SMR development, readers came to Spectrum in droves to learn about the program in a news article authored by contributor Shannon Cuthrell.
But the SMR money paled in comparison to the $80 billion that the United States is spending on a fleet of large-scale nuclear reactors designed by Westinghouse. Will this next group of reactors suffer from the same delays and cost overruns as the ones that put Westinghouse into bankruptcy just a few years ago? Spectrum brought readers an expert analysis on the subject by Wood MacKenzie’s Ed Crooks.
Edmon de Haro
The United States may have the most SMRs in development, but China has the one that’s furthest along. The Linglong One, on the island of Hainan, is expected to begin operations in the first half of 2026. And that’s just one component in a smorgasbord of nuclear reactor experimentation in China. One of the country’s most interesting projects is a thorium-powered, molten-salt reactor, which it began building in 2025 in the Gobi desert. Prior to this project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which shut down in 1969.
The attraction of thorium as a fuel is that it reduces dependence on uranium. Very little information is available on the progress of China’s thorium reactor, but with help from our Taiwan-based freelancer Yu-Tzu Chiu, we know it’s small—only 10 megawatts—and is scheduled to be operational by 2030. Check back with Spectrum for updates on this reactor and the Linglong One.
Radia
While nuclear reactors need to get smaller, wind turbines need to get bigger, say some renewable energy advocates. And the biggest obstacle to bigger wind—besides the present political backlash—is transportation. Roads, bridges, and train tracks dictate the size of on-shore wind turbine blades, and usually can’t accommodate anything over 70 meters long. That’s why Radia, an aviation startup in Boulder, Colo., is building the world’s largest airplane. It will stretch 108 meters in length, be shaped to hold a 105-meter blade, and can land on a makeshift dirt runway. Spectrum contributor Andrew Moseman traveled to Radia’s headquarters to check out the aircraft’s design and fly the behemoth on the company’s simulator. (Spoiler: He landed it.)
National Grid Electricity Transmission/Smart Wires
None of this new energy generation will matter if we can’t move it across the grid to customers who need it. But many key transmission corridors are maxed. Blackouts are growing longer and more common. Building new transmission lines takes years and often gets thwarted by NIMBY pushback. Queues for connecting to the grid, whether you’re providing power or requesting it, can be comically long.
To bridge the gap, grid operators globally are turning to innovative grid tech. Collectively called grid-enhancing technologies (GETs), some of the boldest examples can be found in the United Kingdom. For example, the U.K.’s National Grid has been implementing electronic power-flow controllers, called SmartValves, that shift electricity from jammed circuits to those with spare capacity.
The U.K. and other countries have also been reconductoring old lines and installing dynamic line rating, which calculates how much current high-voltage lines can safely carry based on real-time weather conditions. And Scotland has been beefing up its grid-scale battery stations with advanced converters. These leap into action within milliseconds to release the extra power needed when energy supply elsewhere on the grid falters. Spectrum contributor Peter Fairley, who authored several of these stories, traveled to the U.K. to investigate grid congestion woes and tech solutions.
Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images
At the opposite end of the spectrum, one of the world’s most neglected grids can be found in Cuba. There, decades of poor fuel and maintenance have left the country’s energy infrastructure in crisis. Lately, Cuba’s entire grid has been collapsing every couple of months. Blackouts are so common that citizens are cooking multiple meals at once and working by flashlight, says Ricardo Torres, a Cuban economist who explained the situation for Spectrum readers in this popular expert-authored guest post.
The nearby Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has also been enduring more frequent blackouts, leading some to speculate that the grid in this American territory may go the same way as Cuba’s. The turmoil has prompted widespread development of solar-plus-storage systems across the island that are privately financed, reports Spectrum contributor Julia Tilton.
Edmon de Haro
On the lighter side, we also explored the world of nuclear batteries. These devices store energy in the form of radioactive isotopes. They can last for decades, making them ideal for medical implants, remote infrastructure, robots, and sensors. But the allure of a small battery with a 50-year lifespan has given this sector several false starts. There was a stint in the 1970s where surgeons implanted nuclear-powered pacemakers in over 1,400 people only to lose track of them over time. Regulators balked when devices containing plutonium-238 started turning up in crematoriums and coffins.
Now the field is experiencing a resurgence in interest. Companies on multiple continents are claiming to be on the verge of commercialization of nuclear batteries. Whether they’ll find willing markets is unclear. In a feature for Spectrum, nuclear battery expert James Blanchard details the history of these devices and why there’s suddenly more activity in this field than he’s ever seen in his 40-year career.
Brittany Greeson
Sometimes a story is so good that we just have to publish it, even if we find it somewhere else. That was the case with a chapter from the book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). The chapter tells the tale of one power-train engineer at Ford whose internal-combustion-engine expertise slowly became expendable as car companies pivoted to EVs. With permission, we published an adapted version of the chapter, which is chock-full of excellent reporting from author Mike Colias, a veteran automotive reporter. Don’t miss it! (Spoiler: The engineer, Lem Yeung, who left Ford after 30 years, ended up returning to the company a few years later to help clean up the mess caused by the loss of old-school talent. We caught up with Yeung after his return in this Q&A.)
2025-12-29 21:00:02
Christina had tried dieting and exercise before. The weight always came off but then crept back on, especially after she gave birth to her son in 2022.
She had hoped that a new class of weight-loss drugs might finally offer something different. Obesity treatments such as Wegovy and Zepbound had just arrived on the scene, helping people slim down with unprecedented ease. But the price tag of these GLP-1 drugs put them out of reach. Christina’s health insurance wouldn’t cover the cost.
Desperate for another option, Christina enrolled in a clinical trial that guaranteed several months on a blockbuster weight-loss therapy—and then the possibility of something more. (Christina, a Texas woman in her early 50s, asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy about her weight-loss treatment.)
That something more wasn’t another injection or pill, but a one-time procedure using a new medical device. And instead of targeting the stomach or brain, it focused on the gut itself: rewiring how a part of the upper intestine, known as the duodenum, processes nutrients and regulates metabolism.
Performed via a minimally invasive endoscopic device, this approach is designed to help people who want to stop taking GLP-1 drugs. The goal is to lock in the benefits without the high costs, weekly jabs, or lingering side effects. And in 2026, the first company to develop such a device is likely to seek clearance to bring it to patients.
“We’re creating a new therapeutic area,” says Harith Rajagopalan, cofounder and chief executive of that company, Fractyl Health, based in Burlington, Mass.
You can think of these systems as a middle ground between drugs and bariatric surgery. The endoscope is a slim, flexible tube equipped with a camera and a guidewire that leads a catheter into the digestive system. Doctors send the tools down the throat so they can view and modify the intestines from the inside—remodeling gut tissue and recalibrating its response to food without a single incision. The procedure takes about an hour or so, and patients typically go home the same day.
To understand how the treatment works, it helps to first understand what goes wrong in the gut during years of unhealthy eating. As diets high in sugar and fat bombard the duodenum, the lining there becomes inflamed and its normal signaling pathways distorted. Mucosal cells in the tissue grow abnormally and propagate these maladaptive changes, locking in a dysfunctional pattern that drives cravings, weight gain, and insulin resistance.
The Fractyl device overcomes these entrenched changes. It works by deliberately injuring the tissue, using near-boiling water to burn off diseased cells on the intestinal lining. A natural healing process then kicks in, producing a fresh layer of healthy tissue and re-establishing proper metabolic control.
“You see regrowth at about two weeks, and it continues until the mucosa looks pretty normal,” says Alan Cherrington, a physiologist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine who consults for Fractyl.
Preliminary results from the clinical trial that Christina joined, termed the Remain-1 study, indicate that the procedure is working as intended to stabilize weight after GLP-1 therapy. Three months after stopping Zepbound, study participants who underwent the Fractyl procedure generally held their weight steady or continued to lose weight, while those who received a sham treatment saw the number on their scales climb steadily upward.
The results are “honestly better than I thought they were going to be,” says one of the doctors leading the trial, Shelby Sullivan, a gastroenterologist and obesity-medicine specialist at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.
Sullivan cautions against drawing firm conclusions, given the small number of participants and short follow-up so far. But anyone watching the field won’t have to wait long for clearer answers. “By six months,” she says, “we absolutely will know if it’s working or not.”
If the six-month data demonstrate lasting weight maintenance—full trial readouts are expected in 2026—Fractyl then intends to seek regulatory clearance to market what could become the first device specifically sanctioned for post-GLP-1 weight control.
But Fractyl is hardly alone in pursuing this therapeutic frontier. Endogenex, a company based in Plymouth, Minn., is using a flexible, expandable circuit board to apply pulsed electric fields directly to the duodenal wall to burn away the problem cells. Meanwhile, TeCure, in South Korea, and Aqua Medical, in Pleasanton, Calif., are using lasers and radiofrequency-heated water vapor, respectively, to achieve a similar remodeling of the gut lining.
“In the end, it’s different methods to do the same thing,” says Pichamol Jirapinyo, a bariatric endoscopist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a cofounder of Bariendo, a network of 10 nonsurgical weight-loss clinics across the United States. While ongoing trials may clarify differences in efficacy and safety, Jirapinyo (who consults for Fractyl) expects operational features such as ease of use and procedure time to play a decisive role in determining uptake among practitioners.
Timing of market entry is critical, too—and Fractyl, now leading the pack, is expected to deliver the first large-scale clinical results. Those outcomes, from the trial that Sullivan is leading, could set the tone for an entire class of new device-based obesity treatments aiming to preserve the gains of GLP-1 drugs, notes Endogenex CEO Stacey Pugh. “If they are successful, it’s going to blow this field wide open,” she says.
Not everyone is convinced that resurfacing the duodenum is the way to go. In Europe, the past year saw the arrival of a new weight-loss device called Reset that—while not explicitly authorized for use in a post-GLP-1 drug setting—introduces a sleevelike liner to the duodenum that physically prevents contact between food and the gut wall. That device must be removed within a year, however, offering only a temporary fix.
Other endoscopic approaches target the stomach: One in common use today applies sutures to fold the stomach and shrink its size, while another, more experimental method burns off stomach tissue that regulates the secretion of appetite-stimulating hormones.
These stomach-directed methods may offer a logistical advantage given the relative robustness and accessibility of the stomach, explains Andrew Storm, a therapeutic endoscopist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “The duodenum is paper thin, as compared to the stomach, which is like a thick neoprene bag,” he says.
Regulatory clearance for Fractyl would allow the company to directly promote its product for post-GLP-1 weight maintenance—something that Boston Scientific, maker of the most widely used stomach-suturing device, is not legally permitted to do unless it engages in a new round of clinical trials. And that distinction could give duodenal therapies an edge in marketing. But Storm, who consults for Boston Scientific and has also participated in trials of the Endogenex system, raises concerns about the complexity of duodenal therapy. “It just introduces a whole other level of difficulty for the endoscopist that that I think will impact scalability,” he says.
For patients like Christina, the debate over stomach versus duodenum, or one company’s device versus another’s, is largely academic. What matters for her is that the 50 pounds she lost on Zepbound—nearly 20 percent of her body weight—has stayed off so far, a stability that she attributes to the Fractyl device. Because the trial is randomized and blinded, it is possible she actually received the sham procedure. But Christina is fairly confident that she got the real thing.
Her reasoning comes from small but telling moments, like when her husband was cooking smoked pork burnt ends, sending up the kind of rich aromas that once would have sent her straight to the table. “It smelled really good, but I didn’t have any desire to chow down on it,” Christina says.
Experiences like Christina’s hint at the tantalizing promise of a lasting solution after drug-assisted weight loss, but medical-device development demands more than anecdotes. With pivotal trial readouts on the horizon, the year ahead could determine whether these devices remain hopeful prototypes or become validated tools in the next era of obesity care.
2025-12-28 22:00:01
The skies may have rained on this year’s big climate summit in Belém, Brazil, but engineers have invented plenty of exciting climate tech this year worth celebrating. Here are some of the year’s top IEEE Spectrum climate technology stories:
Richard Zare, Xiaowei Song et al.
Ammonia is a crucial ingredient for human civilization, powering agriculture, explosives, and next-generation cargo ships. Researchers have turned to classical laboratory chemistry and artificial intelligence in search of more efficient ammonia production. In January, freelance contributor Alfred Poor reported on a real-world demonstration of a passive technology that captures ammonia from the wind, no batteries included or needed.
Daniel Kunz
At IEEE Spectrum, we love any story that puts electrons to good use, and freelance contributor Rachel Berkowitz found a startup using piezoelectric catalysts to zap forever chemicals that contaminate our waterways. Most systems spend a lot of energy mechanically filtering out the harmful, long-lasting chemicals, but these researchers propose to use the kinetic energy of natural water flow to drive their system, along with their clever chemical harnessing of electrons. Take that mechanical engineers! And forever chemicals, of course.
Original photo: Emily Waltz
Thought that the only greenhouse gas you had to worry about was carbon dioxide? Beware: Some fluoride-related gases have heat-trapping abilities thousands of time greater than CO2. One in particular, SF6, happens to be the main insulator in high-voltage circuit breakers necessary all across our electrical grids. Energy editor Emily Waltz had the story on how to use supercritical CO2 gas instead, keeping toxic SF6—responsible for about 1 percent of global warming in 2018--out of our supply chain and atmosphere.
Chris Philpot
It’s one thing to prevent emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and quite another to trap carbon from the air. Longtime contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs dove into the question of just how much carbon society might remove from the atmosphere for The Scale Issue. The resulting infographic identifies places we can inject CO2 underground, how much people have managed to capture so far, and the scale of the remaining challenge.
Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/Redux
It will take more than engineering to mine Greenland’s rare earth elements, which are valuable for many types of climate technology, wrote mining consultant and former deputy director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Flemming Getreuer Christiansen in a guest article: It will take political clarity now lacking. Like so many other exciting engineering problems, politics are the limiting factor.
Nicole Millman; Original art: Daria Ustiugova
And finally, because IEEE Spectrum readers know we should balance the technical side of our lives with poetry, a meditation by fiber-optic engineer and poet Steven Searcy on the joys and electrons of summer.
2025-12-28 21:00:02
Ten years ago, ride-sharing giant Uber embraced a sci-fi future in which clean, quiet electric aircraft would shuttle passengers around crowded cities. Uber’s well-funded Elevate initiative, which included a white paper and three high-profile annual summits, effectively launched the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry, promising investors, regulators, and the general public that these futuristic flying taxis were “closer than you think.”
At the time, California-based Joby Aviation was still in stealth mode. But behind the scenes, this pioneering eVTOL developer—which has received more than US $3 billion in total funding, including around $900 million from Toyota—was playing a major role in shaping Uber’s vision. It later stepped in to keep that vision alive, acquiring the Elevate program in 2020 after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi decided to axe it.
Now, Joby, which was founded in 2009 and has become the dominant eVTOL startup, says it is finally on the verge of making “urban air mobility” a reality. It plans to conduct its first passenger flights in 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
“Dubai continues to be our global launchpad for commercial service, and our progress here is a testament to the UAE’s visionary approach to advanced air mobility,” says Anthony Khoury, Joby’s UAE general manager, in an email interview. “Dubai is on track to be the first city in the world to offer a fully integrated, premium air taxi network, and we are sprinting toward that target.”
The company first announced its UAE plans at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2024, striking a deal with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) that gives it an exclusive right to operate air taxis there for six years from the launch of commercial operations.
Joby’s exclusive Dubai deal will help fortify its lead in the global race to commercialize electric air taxis
Joby also signed an agreement with U.K.-based Skyports to design, build, and operate four “vertiport” sites in Dubai—places for the eVTOL aircraft to load and unload passengers and charge their batteries. The first vertiport will be near Dubai International Airport, with additional ones planned for Dubai Mall, the Atlantis the Royal resort, and American University in Dubai.
Joby won’t be the first eVTOL developer to carry passengers. That distinction goes to China’s EHang, which is already conducting limited sightseeing and demonstration flights with its two-seat, autonomous electric multicopters. (Joby’s aircraft are piloted.) If Joby pulls off its goal, however, it will be the first to routinely fly passengers from point to point over urban traffic, in keeping with Uber Elevate’s original vision. Its exclusive agreement in Dubai will help fortify its lead in the global race to commercialize electric air taxis, which includes a handful of other Western eVTOL developers, plus a growing number of Chinese players. Besides its Dubai deal, Joby also has a partnership with Delta to start an airport shuttle service in the United States.
The Joby S4 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft has six electric motors, each weighing 28 kilograms and capable of a peak output of 236 kilowatts.Joby Aviation
Operating a reliable air taxi service is a demanding proposition that will require Joby’s aircraft, charging infrastructure, and scheduling software to perform safely and reliably day in and day out. Since every new and complex technology has teething problems, Joby envisions fairly limited initial operations in 2026.
“We will transition from test flights to more complex proving runs and eventually nonpaying passenger flights out of the completed vertiports, ensuring a seamless passenger experience ahead of full commercial launch,” says Khoury. He adds that Joby is currently working with Skyports to ready its initial vertiports and with government agencies in Dubai and the UAE to receive the necessary approvals for its operations.
“Dubai’s approach is deeper and more comprehensive than what you see in many of the headlines,” said Clint Harper, an aviation infrastructure and policy advisor who recently participated in an advanced air mobility workshop with Dubai’s RTA. “In our workshop,” he says, “the RTA staff had fantastic questions and concerns regarding safety, security, and system-level integration. Everyone recognized and appreciated strong government support and wanted to deliver the right system solution, not just a one-off demo. I was thoroughly impressed and inspired.”
Notably, all of this groundwork is taking place in advance of Joby receiving an initial type certificate for its aircraft from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. In the United States (and elsewhere), a type certificate is typically a prerequisite for conducting commercial operations with paying passengers. Joby claims it’s making good progress toward FAA certification, but how quickly (or slowly) that process moves is largely out of its hands. In recent years, the FAA has been taking longer to certify even conventional airplanes and helicopters, which the industry blames on staffing shortages at the agency and more cautious decision-making in the wake of the Boeing 737 Max crisis.
This perception that certification delays have more to do with bureaucracy than safety may be why Dubai is willing to approve some early operations by Joby in advance of FAA type certification. Interestingly, the United States is now following the UAE’s example. In September, the FAA and U.S. Department of Transportation began soliciting proposals for an eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which will select at least five projects to demonstrate eVTOL operations in the national airspace starting as early as summer 2026.
The FAA has stated that the eIPP won’t allow eVTOL developers to bypass certification requirements or carry paying passengers. However, it will enable them to undertake additional testing and demonstration flights as a stepping-stone to commercial operations. Joby says it’s planning to take part in the eIPP, meaning its air taxis could also be flying over U.S. cities in 2026—even if the only person on board is the pilot.