Five new technology centres expand the Fourth Industrial Revolution network

What happened

On 22 January 2026, during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, agreements were announced for five new Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in France, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and India.

The five centres have distinct mandates: a European Centre for AI Excellence in Paris with VivaTech; a Centre for AI-Driven Innovation hosted by Imperial College London; a Centre for Frontier Technologies in Abu Dhabi hosted by the Technology Innovation Institute; a Centre for Intelligent Future in Abu Dhabi hosted by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence; and a Centre for Energy and Cyber Resilience in Andhra Pradesh in partnership with the state government.

Why it mattered

This was more than another Davos discussion about emerging technology. The agreements created institutional vehicles intended to carry work beyond the Annual Meeting through pilots, policy frameworks and collaboration among government, industry and researchers.

The mandates also show how the technology agenda is broadening. AI remains central, but the new centres connect it with quantum technology, robotics, space, energy systems, cybersecurity and workforce development.

For India, the Andhra Pradesh centre links the technology agenda directly to energy transition and cyber resilience. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, already part of The Davos Collective people directory, described the partnership in terms of energy security, trusted digital systems and talent at scale.

The Davos 2026 connection

The announcement formed part of the Annual Meeting''s wider focus on responsible technology deployment. The Forum''s closing summary also highlighted the five centres among the concrete technology outcomes of the week.

The Davos Collective treats this as one canonical development. Additional reporting on the same five-centre announcement is attached as corroborating sourcing rather than counted as separate archive stories.

Davos 2026 in context

Photo: World Economic Forum / Chris Heeney, via UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The image shows the Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos-Klosters on 19 January 2026 and is used as contextual Davos 2026 imagery; it does not depict the five-centres announcement itself.

Image rights

The Davos 2026 photograph above is published on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. Credit and licence information are retained here with the image. No endorsement by the World Economic Forum or UNCTAD is implied.