Lenovo: 'We were assigned an unprecedented task at the World Cup'
The 2026 World Cup soccer championship takes place in three countries: America, Canada and Mexico, with a record scale of 48 teams competing in 16 stadiums. To ensure the smooth operation of the tournament, FIFA first joined hands with Lenovo as a technology partner, bringing breakthroughs such as the referee's view camera (Refcam) or 3D image simulation for VAR.
"We have to solve an unprecedented problem in the history of sports. When a business is the sole responsible for such a huge project, skepticism is inevitable," Mr. Ken Wong, Vice President and President of Solutions and Services (SSG) of Lenovo, told TechRadar. "But after two weeks of the tournament starting, we are confident in fulfilling our commitment."
For technology at the World Cup to operate smoothly, Lenovo dispatched more than 350 engineers to be on duty 24/7 at all stadiums, as well as at the Technology Operations Center in Miami.
The company also provides about 17,000 hardware devices to create a backbone system for all tournament activities, based on a hybrid cloud platform developed internally by Lenovo.
Technology is considered one of the biggest successes at the 2026 World Cup. Global fans praise the realistic perspective from the referee's Refcam or the realistic 3D avatar simulation image from the VAR room. "Technology will be meaningless if it does not bring real results. Lenovo's role is to optimize the platform, the rest is how FIFA exploits it," Mr. Wong said.
He also commented that the 2026 World Cup is a standard model for other industries to learn from, from logistics management, building operations to smart urban monitoring. Businesses often try to find the most powerful AI model, but when it comes to bringing AI from the lab to reality at scale, data is the decisive factor. The huge amount of data collected from the World Cup is an invaluable lesson for algorithm optimization.
Previously, Jeff Shafer, Senior Vice President of Lenovo, also said that the amount of data transmitted and processed at the 2026 World Cup will exceed any sporting event ever held.
One of the notable changes is that referee support technology such as VAR and SAO (semi-automatic offside detection) no longer rely on the traditional cloud computing model. Instead, the technology will be deployed through an edge computing model, allowing data from hundreds to thousands of cameras and sensors at stadiums to be collected, processed and analyzed on-site on equipment at the stadium without having to be sent to the data center. This helps minimize the delay of AI providing results, speed up the referee support process as well as increase stability and reduce system risk.
With the need to process data on-site, server and edge computing infrastructure will be more complex than previous conventional systems. One of the technologies that provides the ability and processing speed is Hawk-Eye - computer vision technology that uses many high-speed cameras to track the ball's movement trajectory, providing accurate information to referees and viewers. The system works by cross stitching images from different camera angles to create a 3D image and analyze the path of the ball.
Currently, sports have become one of Lenovo's strategic spearheads. Before the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the group was a technology partner of a series of major tournaments such as Formula 1 racing, the Olympic Games, the NHL hockey tournament or the Serie A soccer tournament.
Huy Duc compiled