Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) releases technological trends in 2025 across various industries called “Big Ideas in Tech 2025”

On December 5, 2024, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most famous venture capital firms, released technological trends in 2025 across various industries called “Big Ideas in Tech 2025”.

1. Nuclear Power

In 2025, we’ll see a surge in demand for nuclear energy. A perfect storm of regulatory reform, public enthusiasm, capital infusions, and insatiable energy needs — particularly from AI data centers — will accelerate orders for new reactors for the first time in decades.

As AI advances, America’s energy demand is skyrocketing. For the first time in decades, electricity consumption is on the rise, rattling our aging grid and reigniting the search for new, reliable power sources.

Hyperscale data centers, hungry for clean and consistent energy, are already reviving decommissioned nuclear plants, including Pennsylvania’s once-infamous Three Mile Island, slated to come back online in 2028.

Bipartisan momentum and grassroots support for clean energy have spurred renewed interest in nuclear power. But this is about more than energy: it’s about securing America’s leadership in the global AI race, building a more resilient grid, and future-proofing national prosperity. 

2. Drugs for diabetes, obesity, and cancer are expected to have a massive growth.

In 2025, early-stage biotech startups begin to go after big, common diseases again.

GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and obesity are expected to create a $100 billion plus market by 2030, and have infused new energy into the cardiometabolic disease space.

Perhaps more quietly, we are also experiencing a gradual revolution in how we understand and treat many common auto-immune diseases, like lupus and arthritis.

Recently, a German physician in Munich named Dr. Georg Schett hypothesized that engineered CAR-T cell therapy used for certain B cell cancers might also help patients with B-cell-driven auto-immune diseases. This year he published astonishing results.

In a cohort of 15 patients for whom no other therapies were offering benefit, every single patient experienced dramatic improvement. As Dr. Schett described it: “The CAR-T therapy is like a reset button on a computer; it basically restarts the system and the immune system works perfectly fine.”

Inspired by powerful results like this, as well as the clinical and commercial success of new obesity medications, we expect a new wave of biotech and startup innovation focused on treating (and potentially even curing) our biggest diseases. 

3. AI Video

Already, anyone can create realistic video clips from a single image or simple text prompt.

Several products have emerged in this space over the past two years offering comparable functionality, but diverging levels of consistency and quality.

In 2025, AI-generated video is expected to become further segmented by use case, giving creators more control and better results. 

AI video tools will achieve greater depth in storylines (stretching beyond context-free, five-second clips), higher quality and character consistency, and — most importantly — increased specialization.

Video generation models will be trained to specific uses: for product marketing; for cinematic, long-form film; for hyperrealistic, 3D avatars; for seamless background images and B-roll; for anime conversion.

They’ll become optimized for particular channels, as well, whether TikTok, YouTube, ad campaigns, or the big screen.

There are giant companies to be built from every seemingly niche video tool. In the coming years, AI video will evolve from impressive prototype to art form. 

4. Blockchain transactions, businesses will increasingly accept stablecoins for payments

Stablecoins are the cheapest way to send a dollar, enabling fast global payments. Stablecoins also provide more accessible platforms for entrepreneurs building new payments products: no gatekeepers, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs.

But large enterprises have not yet woken up to the substantial cost savings and new margins that are available to them by switching to these payment rails. 

While we’re seeing some enterprise interest in stablecoins (and early adoption in peer-to-peer payments), stablecoins are expected to see a bigger experimentation wave in 2025.

Small and medium-sized businesses with strong brands, captive audiences, and painful payment costs — like restaurants, coffee shops, corner stores — will be the first to switch from credit cards.

They don’t benefit from credit card fraud protection (given in-person transactions), and are also the most hurt by transaction fees (30 cents per coffee which is a lot of lost margin). 

Businesses are expected to adopt stablecoins.

5. The crypto industry will have its own app stores and discovery like Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store

When crypto apps get blocked by centralized platforms like Apple’s App Store or Google Play, it limits their top-of-funnel user acquisition.

But we’re now seeing newer app stores and marketplaces provide this kind of distribution and discovery, and without gating.

For instance, Worldcoin’s World App marketplace — which not only stores proof-of-personhood but allows access to “mini apps” — enabled 100,000s of users for several apps within just a few days.

Another example is the fee-free dApp Store for Solana mobile phone users. Both of these examples also show how hardware, not just software — phones, orbs — may be the key advantage for crypto app stores… just like Apple devices were for early app ecosystems. 

6. Generative AI will take Google's search market share and disrupt Google’s dominance.

The search monopoly might ends in 2025. 

Google controls about 90% of US search, but its grip is slipping.  Generative AI is coming for search. 

ChatGPT has 250+ million weekly active users. Answer engine Perplexity is gaining share, growing 25%+ month-over-month, and changing the search engagement form; their queries average ~10 words, 3x+ longer than traditional search, and nearly half lead to follow-up questions.

Claude, Grok, Meta AI, Poe, and other chatbots are also carving off portions of search.

Sixty percent of US consumers used a chatbot to research or decide on a purchase in the past 30 days.

For deep work, professionals are leveraging domain-specific providers like Causaly (science), Consensus (academic research), Harvey (law), and Hebbia (financial services). 

Ads and links historically aligned with Google’s mission: organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

But Google has become so cluttered and gamed that users need to dig through the results. Users want answers and depth. Google itself can offer its own AI results, but at the cost of short-term profits.

Google as a verb is under siege. The race is on for its replacement. 

7. AI data center infrastructure will grow over the next 10 years

In the race for AI dominance, compute has become critical national infrastructure. But not every country is equipped to compete.

Training and inference of large-scale AI models takes thousands of power-hungry GPUs — you need ample energy and, by extension, land in places that can effectively dissipate hundreds of megawatts of heat.

Places with the ability to develop, train, and host their own state-of-the-art models AI Hypercenters.

Over the next five to 10 years, Hypercenter will need to develop about three to six gigawatts of installed capacity to keep a seat at the table of frontier AI.

Though that scale doesn’t exist today, there are multiple countries — the U.S., China, Japan, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia among them, racing to reach that target through AI infrastructure build-outs, 100  to 150 megawatts at a time.

Governments have begun to view AI compute infrastructure as a strategic national resource that is critical to maintaining a competitive edge in AI development.

Nations that invest in AI through compute capacity, sustainable energy sources, and forward-thinking policy will dictate the future of scientific and economic progress around the world. 

8. Generative AI is everywhere

AI will be installed on every application and every device.

It’s no longer just running on large servers in the cloud, but on small devices, as well. We’ve learned how to train powerful, small LLMs and image models that can run locally on phones, laptops, and even appliances.

Your text editor will have a built-in LLM that helps you draft emails, your camera app can re-generate the part of a photo you don’t like or summarize what happened in your video. And all of it will run locally, making for a fast, responsive user experience.