Key Takeaways
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For years, the story of EV charging was simple: build more chargers, faster. And the industry delivered. Public DC fast chargers now number in the millions globally, EV sales hit 20.7 million units in 2025, and more than 116 million EVs are expected on the road by the end of 2026. Public charging infrastructure buildout is well underway, surpassing five million chargers worldwide, with spending on infrastructure expected to increase significantly over the next decade.
However, a fundamental shift has occurred, and priorities are changing. Today, success is no longer defined by how quickly operators set up charging stations. It is now more about how reliably those stations perform, how efficiently they operate, and whether they can become sustainably profitable at scale.
Driivz conducted the 2026 State of EV Charging Network Operators survey with 300 senior EV charging professionals across the US, Canada, and Europe to validate this shift, and ask probing questions to capture what these operators, strategists, and technologists are experiencing as they manage real networks today and where they plan to invest for 2026.
What they told us paints a clear picture of an industry moving beyond infrastructure expansion to optimizing operations. And the priorities may surprise you.
Reliability Has Become the #1 Battleground
Last year, site energy constraints were the biggest challenge for operators. This year, network stability and reliability have taken the top spot.
Figure 1: The top 3 challenges operators expect to face in 2026
This change is significant because it shows that the industry is maturing. The focus is no longer just on adding capacity; it’s about making existing resources work reliably. For operators with over 50,000 subscribers, the concern is even greater. The bigger the network, the harder it becomes to maintain uptime across every site, charger, and session.
Figure 2: Stability/Reliability of the network as a top concern, segmented by the number of subscribers
For DC fast-charging operators in particular, reliability directly affects revenue, driver trust, and network utilization. A fast charger that goes offline is not just a minor inconvenience. It is a stranded driver, a lost revenue opportunity, damage to your brand, and, potentially worse, a lost customer.
Utilization is becoming the defining profitability metric
The survey also revealed a strong alignment between operators’ biggest challenges and their top profitability priorities. When asked which factor would drive profitability over the next 12 months the most, 59% of respondents cited increased charger utilization. It was the clear leader, ahead of network uptime/reliability and pricing and yield management.
Figure 3: Top factors expected to drive profitability over the next 12 months
That finding says a lot about where the market is heading. Operators are no longer just trying to expand. They are focused on maximizing the performance of existing assets. Reliable uptime, pricing optimization, and seamless driver experiences all feed directly into that goal.
What is interesting is how closely the top profit drivers align with the top challenges. Utilization requires network uptime/reliability, which in turn requires the right software, monitoring, and proactive issue resolution capabilities. These are not separate issues; they are different views of the same problem.
AI has become an operational necessity
Another major takeaway from the survey is how quickly AI is becoming an integral part of EV charging operations. More than two-thirds of respondents described AI as either “very important” or “critical” to company growth.
Figure 4: Importance of AI as an enabler of company growth
What stands out is not just the level of interest. It is the maturity of the use cases. Operators are already using AI in some of the most crucial areas of the business, including:
- Charger anomaly detection
- Pricing optimization
- Utilization forecasting
- Predictive maintenance
- Reducing demand charges
These use cases share a common thread: they all aim for the same operational goals that keep showing up throughout the survey. Better uptime. Higher utilization. Lower costs. AI is not an add-on; it is becoming the driving force behind those goals.
But there is an important catch. The report also points out significant barriers that prevent wider AI adoption. Data quality, integration complexity, and unclear ROI ranked among the top obstacles.
Figure 5: Main barriers to using or increasing AI usage today
That finding reinforces a broader reality across the industry: AI is only as effective as the operational data and platform architecture supporting it.
Most platforms have added AI features.
Driivz has spent years building what no market players can replicate: cross-network, cross-market operational data from the world’s largest managed charging deployments.
That data trains better models, surfaces patterns invisible to single-network operators, and delivers intelligence that holds up at tier-1 scale
Energy management may be the industry’s most underestimated profit lever
Operators ranked smart energy procurement and load management as the top planned approach for reducing operational costs in 2026.
Figure 6: Top planned approaches to optimize operations to reduce costs in 2026
However, energy management ranked much lower when operators were asked about direct drivers of profitability (see Figure 3).
That disconnect matters.
As DC fast-charging networks grow, energy becomes one of the highest operational costs. Smart load balancing, dynamic energy optimization, renewable integration, and demand charge reduction are no longer “nice-to-have” capabilities. They have a direct impact on network finances.
Operators who bridge this gap will have a clear competitive advantage in profitability and growth.
Could 2026 Be the Year of Plug and Charge?
When asked about planned investment areas for 2026, network stability and availability come out on top, which matches the rest of the survey findings. However, the largest increase from last year belongs to seamless authentication. It rose from 20% in last year’s survey to 43% this year, securing the second spot. Segmenting seamless authentication by the number of subscribers revealed that larger networks emphasize it even more.
Figure 7: Top planned investment areas in 2026 to ensure a good EV charging experience, with seamless authentication segmented by number of subscribers
That leap may indicate increasing support for ISO 15118 and Plug and Charge. For DC fast charging, where the driver experience lives or dies in the first thirty seconds of a session, seamless authentication is not a premium feature. It is a basic expectation that larger networks are now working to achieve because drivers will choose networks that are dependable, easy to use, and seamless.
The Road Ahead
The EV charging industry is continuing to grow. Wood Mackenzie predicts there will be 133 million ports globally by 2040, with annual spend reaching $300 billion. The market is huge. The question is, which operators will capture it?
The winners will not be the ones who deploy the most hardware. They will be the ones who operate the most reliably, generate the most revenue from existing assets, and build platforms intelligent enough to improve over time. Software, data, and AI are the differentiators now.
The full 2026 State of EV Charging Network Operators report explores the industry’s biggest operational challenges, investment priorities, cybersecurity posture, integration strategies, and the emerging trends shaping the future of EV charging.
Download the full report to see where the industry is heading next.
