article by Marius Ghenea

While 2024 was a year with a lot of talking about the future – about AI, about energy transition, about quantum computing – I believe 2025, the year which is about to come to an end soon, is the one when we finally have started to live in the future. Instead of the AI experimentation, hallucination and sometimes utopian startup investments in this sector from 2024, this year we witnessed the actual start of real, global AI implementations!  

Agentic AI is not just a buzz word anymore, but rather a paradigm shit for the organizations, big and small, driving huge productivity increases but, on the flipside, triggering potentially massive layoffs and forcing a complex and painful restructuring of the workforce everywhere: from “we want to work from home alone”, pun intended, as the employees used to say, to “ you can stay at home, no need for you in the workforce” coming now back from the HR departments of so many companies. Future has a way of catching people off-guard, we need to be more agile and adapt quicker, if we want to stay ahead. 

It is interesting to note that, to some extent, this AI surge was also responsible for a renewed global quest to find and maximize sustainable energy production: in 2025, for the first time in history, the World relied on renewable energy sources for 45% of its energy needs, meaning that almost half of all energy produced was renewable this year! With infrastructure and power constraints in order to cope with the rapid scaling of data centers and their need for electricity. An important role was played by battery technologies and the massive reduction in price of the battery storage systems through the year, as this seems to be the future of renewable energy… 

On the geopolitical front, there still is a real and terrible front in Ukraine with millions of victims already, and it seems Russia has no intention, nor have they any real plan on how to get to a negotiation peace agreement with, largely, the rest of the World. This prompted a lot of changes in the strategies of globalized businesses around the planet, as supply-chains continue to be quite dependent on politics, power-plays and wars. To eliminate the weakest links, made quite visible during Covid and then with the wat in Ukraine, companies are rethinking their policies towards near-shoring and, more and more, towards friend-shoring, in order to avoid vulnerabilities and dependencies. US has played a cowboy tariff strategy in 2025, it remains to be seen if this was the right thing to do, but certainly it alienated a lot of otherwise friendly nations around the world and it became clear that we are into a “everybody for themselves” era, one of aggressive and, in my opinion, unnecessary protectionism, ushered in by Trump. 

And amidst all these uncertain and future-like events this year, Elon Musk comfortably took the seat as the wealthiest person on Earth, challenging the 1 trillion dollar mark for 2026, with 700 billion in his pocket already today, as journalists would say (of course they are not in his pocket, but rather in the optimistic dreams of the investors in his companies). At the same time, Berkshire-Hathaway broke the 1 trillion dollar mark this year, another important milestone for an investment company from our planet, the first non-tech US business to reach this mark. And with Warren Buffet stepping down in a few days, who knows what the future holds for their stock, particularly since Berkshire-Hathaway had until recently a very conservative approach on tech and AI in particular, so we should expect some changes there. 

One good thing about 2025 is that we heard less about crypto, especially in recent months, as it became clear that it’s a very risky bet and it could create a lot of passive loss for the holders, not passive income, as they had hoped for! I will say it again, there is no fundamental value behind crypto-currencies and, moreover, they are not the future of money, it’s just a scam, it’s simply the first truly global Ponzi scheme… 

At the end, a few considerations about the global VC ecosystem: while there have been some problems, the VC’s look stronger than ever, indeed with a Survivor-type approach showcasing a battle between the Giants and the Specialist, largest VC Funds like the $100bn Softbank, between their funds, vs. the more specialized ones investing only in AI or only in energy transition, etc. Disbursements have massively increased especially in AI early-stages, for instance, while OpenAI is not necessarily so early-stage anymore, they have set the scene in Q1 with their landmark $40bn equity round, unheard of before in the history of VC investments. This, together with other developments through the year, would value the company and half a trillion dollars, and others like Anthropic or xAI (again, Elon and its so-called Muskonomy) are following suit, albeit with half of OpenAI’s valuation, at most. And let’s just say we are so proud to have one company with Romanian founders in this AI related stratosphere, namely Databricks, which is already substantially north of $100bn, after the last VC rounds. 

With all these major shifts in 2025 towards the future, as we have read about it in sci-fi books in the past millennium, it’s a great question what would still change in 2026 and what should we be looking for, or what should be on the lookout for, to be more specific. But what we can say for sure is that we enter the New Year leaner and more automated than ever before, into this future designed by AI. But make no mistake, while AI is arguably the biggest business and human opportunity of our time, it is also the one with the highest entry barriers, by far!