Drones are now expected to become a $250 billion market by 2035 in World Economy News 30/03/2026 The global drone market is entering a transformative expansion phase, with valuations projected to reach $250 billion by 2035. According to a new special report from Barclays (LSE: BARC), the integration of artificial intelligence into unmanned aerial vehicles, a shift labeled as “Physical AI,” is fundamentally altering the defense landscape. Individual one-way units remain relatively inexpensive, often costing below $50,000, but the broader ecosystem required to deploy autonomous swarms at scale is creating a massive new frontier for capital expenditure. The shift from hardware to compute The transition toward AI-led defense is shifting the industry’s center of gravity away from traditional manufacturing and toward compute, data centers, and software. Barclays analysts note that the market size has already doubled from approximately $20 billion in 2020 to over $40 billion in 2025. As drones become a core growth engine of the tech sector, second only to autonomous vehicles, the constraints on deployment are moving beyond traditional defense budgets. Future scaling will increasingly depend on AI capital expenditure, energy availability, and access to critical minerals. The “Physical AI” movement is expected to structurally lower operating costs over the long term by reducing the need for human personnel in high-risk environments. However, the front-loading of costs into software and autonomous decision-making systems means that defense contractors are effectively becoming tech firms. Shifting from hardware to compute represents a significant realignment of value toward companies that can master the intersection of robotics and real-time AI processing. Strategic implications for global security As the race to deploy autonomous swarms intensifies, the geopolitical significance of the drone industry is reaching a fever pitch. The ability to deploy low-cost, high-impact technology at scale is providing a tactical advantage that traditional platforms struggle to match. Investors are closely watching the minerals and energy bottleneck, as the massive power requirements for AI data centers and the demand for specialized components could dictate the pace of innovation through the next decade. Source: Investing.com 2026-03-30 hellenicshippingnews... window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-US'}; (function(w, d, s) { function go(){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], load = function(url, id) { if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.src = url; js.id = id; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }; load('//connect.facebook.net/en/all.js#xfbml=1', 'fbjssdk'); load('https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', 'gplus1js'); load('//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js', 'tweetjs'); } if (w.addEventListener) { w.addEventListener("load", go, false); } else if (w.attachEvent) { w.attachEvent("onload",go); } }(window, document, 'script')); tweet Share