2025 was undoubtedly the year of AI.
Big Tech disbursed roughly 400 billion dollars in investmentsa spending spree so big that some economists believe it helped avert a global recession. Nvidia became the first $4 trillion company. And AI content has become inescapable, infiltrating everything from Hollywood to campaign ads – even Mickey Mouse is getting into AI.
It hasn’t been a never-ending party. Seemingly every few weeks the stock market gets scared that the music is about to stop. Only Universal’s Wicked for Good was more bubble-focused.
Here’s a look back at the biggest AI stories of 2025.
The Wall Street thought bubble
In an age of nostalgia traps, traders can’t decide if we’re in the Dot-Com era again.
Tech and AI CEOs can’t agree either. In August, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked concerns that a bubble had already formed. Since then, Bill Gates, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Mark Cuban, and Mark Zuckerberg have expressed their own similar or dissenting views.
The thinking of optimists often led to railroads and other revolutionary innovations that transformed the economy.
“We talked a lot about a AI bubble“, Huang said during Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings conference call. “From our perspective, we see something very different.”
Even those at the forefront of AI advancements worry that some of their competitors are too bold.
“There is a real uncertainty, a real dilemma, that we as a company are trying to manage in the most responsible way possible,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in early December at a New York Times event. “And then I think there are players who are yoloing, who are pulling the wrist button too far, and I’m very concerned.”
The craze for investment spending
The scale of the expenditure is breathtaking.
JPMorgan Chase concluded that AI spending contributed 1.1% of GDP growth in the first half of the year.
Spending is not expected to slow down.
Over the past two years, Wall Street underestimated investment growth, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Right now, Goldman said, the consensus estimate is that hyperscalers will spend $527 billion in capital expenditures next year.
Zuckerberg and OpenAI executives separately suggested that the biggest risk was not spending enough.
“We want to be ahead of the curve,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman said in a recent video posted on
Sam Altman of OpenAI. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
War for AI talent
The turf wars in Silicon Valley were much greener in 2025. Over the summer, War for AI talent reached another level.
Perhaps no company was as aggressive as Meta. Zuckerberg decided to poach top talent by wooing workers with tens of millions of dollars.
Altman said OpenAI offered its top employees $100 million signing bonuses. Another senior OpenAI official said Zuckerberg even made homemade soup for one of his targets.
OpenAI boasted that it largely rebuffed Meta’s efforts, although ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao later joined Meta’s superintelligence lab.
Time is a flat circle, just like AI agreements
Even hyperscalers need extra help maintaining their spending habits.
This is why AlphabetAmazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle issued around $100 billion in bonds, propelling global bond sales to another record year.
The interconnected nature of many AI-related transactions has also raised concerns among some analysts and traders. Take for example Anthropic’s commitment to spend $30 billion on Microsoft Azure to scale Claude’s compute. As part of the deal, Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Nvidia, whose chips are sure of this deal and many others, also agreed to invest up to $10 billion.
Not all spenders are created equally, either. OpenAI, which is expected to lose $9 billion this year, projects spending about $1.4 trillion on AI data centers over the next decade. Unlike Google, Meta and Microsoft, OpenAI also does not have an established revenue base to fall back on.
That’s why Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, sparked a brief firestorm when she appeared to suggest the startup would welcome the possibility of a government bailout to support its data center bets. Friar walked back her remarks, and Altman later emphasized that OpenAI did not believe in bailouts.
Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Google takes over
OpenAI has led much of the AI model race since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Three years later, it was Altman who declared a “code red,” just over a month after OpenAI completed its restructuring, aimed at giving it more freedom to raise money to fund its AI advancements.
Google is now fighting back and, in the view of some observers, has caught up with OpenAI with the widely praised release of Gemini 3.
CEO Sundar Pichai might as well have hit Steph Curry’s signing celebration when asked what’s next for his AI team.
“I think some people need to sleep,” Pichai said of the company’s staff after Gemini 3’s release.