Companies to Watch in 2025

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FUTURE

Companies to Watch in 2025

2025 is going to be another amazing year for AI.

But while 2022-2024 was primarily focused on building the foundation models that will run the new software paradigm of declarative software, perfectly embodied by the trillion-dollar use case of AI: the Large Language Model (LLM) Operating System we already talked about, 2025 will be the year of transformative products actually being delivered into our hands.

If we were primarily observers of the industry until now, you will now become power users (sorry, using ChatGPT to summarise a PDF doesn’t count as a power user).

Over the next few weeks, we will examine in detail the known and unknown companies that will run the show in 2025 across several categories, such as hardware, intelligence, product, discovery, and industry-wise companies. We will go AI layer by AI layer, from the more predictable bets to those that are oblivious to most… but not to us.

Today, you’ll learn about many companies that could soon run the show, from:

upcoming stars attacking NVIDIA’s biggest flaws,

the big plans of several star researchers,

over-the-top moonshot,

and even companies that are calling bullshit on everything and everyone.

Let’s dive in!

Hardware

2024 has been yet another massive year for AI accelerator companies, the companies creating the hardware used to train and run AI models.

The Best Performant Class

Particularly, NVIDIA has tripled revenues to almost $100 billion (just in the AI business), but others like AMD or Broadcom have also seen great traction.

It’s safe to say that hardware companies are the only tangible winners in AI so far (alongside some application-layer enterprises), as model developers are drowning in losses and can only survive through billion-dollar investment rounds.

2025 is going to be no different (NVIDIA is already sold out for 2025 in Blackwell chips, the upcoming generation), but we will test whether the challengers are up for the job.

While everyone directly assumes ‘AI hardware = GPUs,’ that’s a false and narrowed view because that reduces your set of companies to GPU chip designers like NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Huawei, if you’re Chinese.

Chip manufacturers like TSMC, Micron, or SMIC have also been great winners, but they can also manufacture other chip types.

However, 2024 saw the emergence of new hardware with a set of unique traits that could seriously challenge GPUs. To understand why this is the case, we must understand that we are transitioning into an era of inference-main compute, which significantly impacts hardware companies, especially GPU ones.

In layman’s terms, while up until now most compute was dedicated to training AI models, the balance will shift to running these models (inference), especially due to the emergence of Large Reasoner Models (LRMs), which I’ve talked about a lot and can be summarized in my extensive review of OpenAI’s ground-breaking o3 model.

And that is a problem for NVIDIA and an opportunity for others. But why?

The Balance of AI Workload Changes

Unbeknownst to…

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