The numbers are hard to ignore. According to EU-funded research, nearly 78 million IoT batteries are discarded globally every single day. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a structural failure baked into how the industry has built connected devices for the past decade, and it’s one that Sam Miri and the team at Atmosic Technologies have spent years working to fix.
A Mismatch Built Into the Hardware
Here’s the core problem: most IoT devices are engineered to last ten years or more. Their batteries? Two years, maybe less. Multiply that gap across the 30 billion connected devices projected to be online by the early 2030s, and you’re not looking at a sustainability inconvenience. You’re looking at a logistical and environmental crisis that gets worse every quarter.
The solution is to harvest power from the environment itself, from ambient light, motion, heat, and radio waves. No battery needed, or at least one that barely gets touched. What’s been complicated is getting the whole industry to build toward the same standard.
Why One Company Can’t Solve This Alone
That’s exactly why the formation of the Ambient IoT Alliance (AIoTA) matters. Launched in February 2025, the coalition brought together Atmosic, Infineon, Intel, Qualcomm, PepsiCo, VusionGroup, and Wiliot around a shared mission: build an open, interoperable, multi-standard ecosystem for batteryless IoT devices.
PepsiCo’s involvement is worth noting. When a major consumer goods company joins a chip-level standards coalition, it signals that end users (the people actually deploying IoT at scale across supply chains and logistics) are done waiting.
Embedded World 2026: The Public Debut
This March 10-12 in Nuremberg, the AIoTA takes the stage publicly at Embedded World 2026 for the first time as an organized body. It’s the moment ambient IoT steps out of the lab and into the mainstream industry conversation, with sessions covering the alliance’s mission, standards progress, and the path toward pervasive, infrastructure-free connectivity.
The Long View
Sam Miri has watched the connected device space evolve across more than two decades, from motion sensors to smart building controls to wireless chips. His read: the technology has been ready for a while. What was missing was alignment. With the AIoTA now organized and presenting publicly, that alignment is materializing. What it unlocks isn’t just fewer batteries in landfills, it’s IoT deployments that are cheaper to maintain, easier to scale, and built to actually last as long as the devices they power.
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