Vancouver Web Summit 2026: The Green, The Bright and the Unexpected
This year's Web Summit featured ambitious talent from accross the country and abroad, setting the stage to collaborate and address the problems of the future, today.
Across the different stalls, talks, and conferences in the venue, one thing was very clear: the world needs to address the current environmental and geopolitical climate. With the rapid growth of AI models, and the widespread race to integrate it by many entities around the globe, there has come a new push to use it to tackle all sorts of existing problems, as well new issues that have arisen because of AI and GenAI.
The recent oil blockade in the Strait of Hormuz due to the sudden US war agains Iran provoked a spike of interest in green renewable and reliable energy, both worldwide and in the Summit itself. At the Climate Innovation Zone and the Vancouver exhibition, there were many important discussions about the future of green energy in the Province, Canada, and the rest of the world. These talks were packed with spectators from all walks of life: members of the media, investors seeking to the next green project to fund, cleantech startup founders looking for advice to grow in the space, and laypeople like me, ready to hear with optimism and a healthy dose of skepticism what new advancements are happening in the space and what the future of green tech will bring.
Below are this layman's thoughts on the three major talks I attended at the Summit. There were plenty more talks about cleantech, indigenous sovereignty in technology, and other interesting topics that I would've loved to attend but unfortunate scheduling conflicts made it so I had to pick and choose which events to attend, and these are the ones I chose.