Lenovo to power FIFA World Cup 2026

As football’s global governing body, FIFA, gears up for its largest-ever World Cup in 2026, it has enlisted technology giant Lenovo as its official partner to manage the operational and digital demands of the tournament.

In a recent media briefing, executives from both organisations outlined the scope of the partnership, which aims to leverage advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to enhance the experience for teams, broadcasters, and the estimated six billion fans who will tune in.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across the US, Mexico, and Canada, is set to be an event of unprecedented scale, featuring a record 48 teams, 104 games, and 16 host cities. Running such a massive event requires a robust technology backbone, a role which Lenovo is well-positioned to fill, said FIFA technology director Nacho Fresco.

“We need a partner who is able to deliver fast, because in a World Cup football match, we cannot wait for just one minute,” Fresco said, adding that Lenovo’s innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, as well as high-quality standards, helped to seal the deal.

For Lenovo, its work with FIFA will allow it to showcase its full breadth of capabilities beyond its reputation as a major PC maker. Besides supplying laptops, tablets, and Motorola smartphones used by officials to run the games, the company will also provide servers, storage, and edge infrastructure to power systems like the Hawk-Eye video assistant referee used by FIFA referees to make pitch decisions.

Jeff Shafer, Lenovo’s senior vice-president of corporate marketing, said the World Cup is also an opportunity for the company to transform itself into an AI powerhouse. “The reality is that if we can do it for FIFA, F1 and the Olympics, then we know we can do it for anybody out there, from consumers to the biggest companies in the world.”

Art Hu, Lenovo’s chief information officer, concurred, noting that the partnership is in line with its transition to a services-led, AI-first company in a hybrid world, focusing on developing custom capabilities for use cases where out-of-the-box solutions do not exist.

For example, Hu said tablets will be deployed to not only help VIP guests such as government leaders get seated, but also provide them with access to content, such as game snippets and match statistics, delivering a high-touch experience for a targeted set of users.

While AI-powered services and applications for players, coaches, broadcasters and fans are being saved for a major reveal at the CES technology show in Las Vegas in January 2026, Shafer said “if we can use AI to deliver something of value to each one of those groups, we'd have achieved our goal.”

Santiago Manso, Lenovo’s director for sports vertical, added that the robustness of the systems and infrastructure used to support World Cup games can be replicated in other fields, such as nuclear power, smart energy grids, and military defence – all of which require high resiliency.

In the run-up to World Cup 2026, Lenovo had the opportunity to apply its capabilities during the FIFA Club World Cup this past summer, where it helped implement semi-automated offside technology, leading to faster and more accurate offside calls that reduced game delays. “That benefits the players, broadcasters and fans, and it makes the game better,” Shafer said.

When asked by Computer Weekly about what’s being done to secure the high-profile tournament – a prime target for disruption – against cyber threats, Manso said Lenovo is incorporating security into all its devices and services from the design stage, he said, adding that the company is also working with FIFA and governments in host countries to incorporate multiple layers of security.

Ultimately, both organisations see the partnership as a legacy-defining project. “We are going to have the most technologically advanced FIFA World Cup,” Fresco said, adding that the work done for the men’s World Cup will extend to future tournaments, including the Women’s World Cup in 2027.