The Promenade Matrix: Corporate Houses and National Pavilions

Two systems, one street

• —Corporate houses are built for targeted, tracked meetings with existing clients and prospects — most run a guest list, and getting past the door usually means already being on it.
• —National pavilions are funded by governments chasing foreign investment, so their whole point is letting strangers in. Daytime access at most of them is close to open.

The corporate and thematic houses

• —AI House, at Promenade 67, is the single busiest venue in our own tracked programme — 44 sessions this year, run by the ETH AI Center and Merantix Capital, more than any other house on the strip.
• —Palantir Pavilion, Promenade 86, is one of the more secure buildings on the Promenade, drawing defence-tech and sovereign-fund executives rather than a general crowd. Anthropic has run its own House on the Promenade too, part of a broader shift of AI companies planting a physical flag at Davos rather than just sending a speaker.
• —Deloitte Haus, Promenade 85, runs a tighter calendar — 10 sessions in our tracking, most needing registration well ahead of the week. HCLTech (Promenade 66), Web3 Hub (Obere Strasse 33) and Brain House (Symondstrasse 7, at the ICON) round out the busiest of the thematic houses — each built around one subject rather than one company.
• —Not every branded presence on the Promenade is a full building, either: Google Cloud's activation in 2026 was a smaller, temporary lounge rather than a multi-storey house — the same corporate-house rules apply, just at a different scale.

Session counts are Davos Access's own tracking for the 2026 programme. Palantir and Anthropic run largely private calendars we don't track session-by-session.

The national pavilions

• —India has the largest single footprint on the Promenade: the India Pavilion spans roughly 10,000 square feet across Promenade 67 and 73, run by Invest India and CII. A record ten Indian states, including Maharashtra under Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, pitched investment-ready projects there in 2026, and chef Manu Chandra ran the kitchen — rajma chawal and filter-coffee tiramisu for delegates used to hotel catering.
• —Saudi Arabia's presence is the most visually dramatic: the kingdom took over the entire Migros supermarket building next to the Congress Centre and rebranded it as Saudi House, built around the Vision 2030 programme. It's the biggest physical statement on the Promenade relative to how few sessions we actually track there — 2, against 44 at AI House alone.
• —USA House runs out of the English Church, just beyond the security perimeter — a converted 1880s church now branded "Freedom 250" for the 250th anniversary of US independence in 2026. Ukraine House (Promenade 59, run by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation) and Qatar's pavilion (Promenade 80) both keep a steadier, smaller footprint.
• —South Africa House works differently again: rather than public programming, it's a centralised base for Team South Africa's own partners — reserved meeting rooms for bilateral talks and stakeholder sessions rather than a walk-in space.

The gatekeeper playbook

• —Corporate houses fill public panels for visibility, and that's a genuine way in — arriving about 15 minutes before a scheduled panel is a normal, legitimate way to get a seat for that session. It gets you into that one panel, not the run of the building.
• —Beyond that, the honest route is a contact who's already inside: ask them to add your name to the guest register, or meet you at the door. House security generally can't act on a request from anyone outside the building — the person who invited you has to vouch for you directly.
• —National pavilions don't need any of that. The India Pavilion and the Gulf pavilions in particular are built for exactly this — walk in, use the wifi, get a coffee. It's some of the most reliable unbadged workspace on the Promenade during the day.

Moving between them

• —Motorcades and ID checks slow the Promenade down at the busiest hours, especially late morning into early afternoon — a walk that looks like five minutes on a map can take much longer once you account for the crowd and the checks. On foot beats a car for anything on the strip itself.
• —Large backpacks slow down security checks and don't fit easily into a house's lounge furniture — a slim folio does the same job without the friction.
• —The rest of the practical packing list — actual winter boots, not city ones — is covered properly on our alpine-winter piece; it applies here exactly as much as anywhere else on the Promenade.

What's changing for 2027

• —Davos by the Numbers puts the unbadged crowd on and around the Promenade at roughly 27,000 people most years — most of whom never touch the Congress Centre, but plenty of whom pass through a corporate house or a pavilion at some point in the week.
• —The municipality's new cap on temporary structures, covered in full in our piece on the 2027 building rules, limits how many new houses and pavilion conversions get approved at all. Established venues like the ones above aren't affected; a brand-new company or country trying to build something from scratch this cycle has a harder path.
• —One national pavilion has bigger news than a building permit: South Africa is set to host WEF's own Special Meeting in 2027, a first for the continent — worth watching if you're tracking where national delegations put their attention next.

Corporate houses vs. national pavilions, at a glance