Technologies to watch in 2025

Even AI can’t predict the future (yet), but two of our technology editors took a look ahead at what we think will be big in 2025.

As 2022 draws to a close, the outlook for the crypto business looks bleak.

One of the best-known companies, FTX, collapsed with $8bn (£6.3bn) of customer funds missing.

In March 2024, the company’s co-founder Sam Bankman Freed was sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding customers and investors.

The scandal has shaken confidence throughout the industry.

Cryptocurrency remained a niche product, and although it had a passionate following, it seemed like it would be relatively limited.

But just a few months later, the industry began to feel optimistic again. Behind the enthusiasm is Donald Trump’s success in the November 5 presidential election.

It was thought that he might be more friendly towards the crypto sector, and so far that seems to be the case.

In early December, President Trump announced that he would nominate former Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Paul Atkins to head the Wall Street regulator.

Atkins is seen as much more pro-crypto than outgoing CEO Gary Gensler.

With this announcement, the value of Bitcoin, the largest of many virtual currencies, soared to $100,000.

“With Trump’s victory, you can imagine that we will see aggressive regulation in place in 2025. Some negative regulation will be lifted, allowing banks and other institutions to enter this space. ” said Jeffrey Kendrick, global head of digital asset research. Standard Chartered.

In particular, Kendrick points to guidance issued by the SEC called SAB 121. Since it took effect in 2022, it has become difficult for banks and other financial companies to provide virtual currency services.

Such a move could help fulfill President Trump’s July promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.

If he makes good on that promise, it would be a remarkable turnaround from 2021, when President Trump called Bitcoin a “fraud.”

As AI tools move to our phones, Apple, Google, and Samsung have all launched services that can edit photos, translate languages, and perform web searches. We are at the beginning of an era where AI will become an essential part of our digital lives. It is also becoming increasingly useful on a personal level.

That’s if we allow it, but it requires a bit of a leap.

Let’s take diary management as an example. Granting access to AI tools will help you manage your diary efficiently. But how far should this go?

Does that mean that to be really helpful, you need to know who you don’t want to see and whose relationships you want to keep secret from?

Want to provide an overview of your counseling sessions or medical appointments?

This is extremely personal information, and if it somehow gets shared, it can be both extremely embarrassing and extremely valuable. Would you trust a big tech company with that kind of data?

Microsoft is fully committed to this particular door. In 2024, the company demonstrated a tool called Recall that takes snapshots of a laptop’s desktop every few seconds to help users find content they’ve seen but can’t remember where. I ran into trouble because of this.

Nowadays, many changes have been made to this product, which was never released, but remains as it is.

“I think we’re moving into a fundamentally new era where we’re going to have an ever-present, permanent and highly capable co-pilot companion in our daily lives.” Mustafa Suleiman, the company’s head of AI, told me recently.

Despite the challenges, Ben Wood, chief analyst at technology research firm CCS Insight, predicts more personalized AI services will emerge in 2025.

“Outputs are continuously updated by leveraging evolving data sources such as emails, messages, documents, and social media interactions.

“This allows AI services to be tailored to individual communication styles, needs and preferences,” he says.

But Wood acknowledged that divulging personal information to AI would be a big step.

“Trust is going to be essential,” Wood said.

The more money poured into AI, the more data centers will need to be built.

Training and running AI requires large amounts of computing power, but it works best with modern computer chips and servers.

According to CCS Insight, the largest data users, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta, could invest up to $1 trillion in data centers over the next five years.

In Europe alone, data center capacity is expected to increase by an average of 9% per year from 2024 to 2028, according to real estate services firm Savills.

But these new facilities are unlikely to be built in current data center hubs such as London, Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

Property prices in these cities are high – land prices in London can reach as much as £17 million an acre, according to Savills – and tight electricity supplies are forcing developers to look elsewhere. will look to.

In the UK, cities such as Cambridge, Manchester and Birmingham are likely to be home to the next wave of data center construction.

Other regions that could be considered in Europe include Prague, Genoa, Munich, Düsseldorf and Milan.

At the heart of these new data centers will be the latest computer chips from Nvidia, a company that dominates the market for chips used for AI.

Blackwell chips, announced in March 2024, are expected to start shipping in large quantities in 2025.

The new chip will allow tech companies to train AI four times faster and 30 times faster than current computer chips, said Vivek Arya, senior semiconductor analyst at Bank of America Securities. It will be possible to confirm that the AI ​​is working.

According to reports, NVIDIA’s biggest customers Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Coreweave are likely to get the technology first.

However, other customers may have a hard time getting their hands on the superchip due to “limited supply in 2025,” Arya said.