What’s brewing for the next year? Power plays and change. The CEO power position. Companies gaining power in the industry. Consuming too much power. The power of gaming. Powerful AI is not free. Arm flexes its muscle and power. And, the power of the rumor mill. All that courtesy of the power of tasseography.
I might not be able to read tea leaves, but after years of covering the tech industry, “reading” the industry trends and signs is my cup of tea, at least to the extent of offering up my predictions for the GPU and related markets in 2025. My divination is not born of witchcraft but careful consideration: 2025 will be a year of change.
- Intel hires an outsider to be CEO, who takes a chain saw to the place and makes the deep cuts that are necessary, not the surgical cuts that Gelsinger was taking. One of those deep cuts will be the fabs. They will indeed spin them off fully, just like AMD did in 2008. But it will be long and painful and expensive, just like AMD’s spin-off was.
- And Gelsinger will be vindicated as people realize the severity of the situation and that he was trying to do his best. But don’t expect Intel to acknowledge it publicly.
- AMD finally gains ground against Nvidia in HPC and AI: The Instinct cards offer competitive performance and have proven themselves in supercomputers like Frontier. The Top 500 supercomputer list in 2025 will feature many more Instinct-driven machines. The company’s gaming GPUs, though, will continue to languish.
- Nvidia will face pushback on its power consumption, as data centers are now drawing more power than entire cities, and it will only get worse with the advent of AI factories or data centers with large AI subsections. Municipalities and power companies are going to put their foot down and say enough. What exactly Nvidia can do about it without crippling its processors is another story.
- New consoles from Sony and Microsoft: Their current consoles are getting old, and sales are trailing off. It is high time for a hardware refresh that fully embraces the cloud, AI, and other new technologies. If we still had E3, that would be the time to announce it. Perhaps this will happen at the upcoming CES show.
- AI has to deliver. Right now, the biggest companies are investing billions in AI equipment such as xAI building a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. What do they have to show for it? In the freebie culture of the Internet, people will not be willing to spend money on monthly subscriptions, especially given how hit or miss these chatbots can be. These massive AI systems got to start paying for themselves, but there will be pushback from investors.
- Arm breaks out big. On the PC client, Arm is up to 10% market share. If, as predicted, there is a major new version of Windows 11 coupled with the end of support for certain versions of Windows 10, we will experience a big PC refresh, and this is a chance for Arm PCs to really make a move.
- On the server side, every major hyperscaler has their own home brew Arm processor that is increasingly competing with Intel and AMD. At its recent AWS re:Invent conference, AWS said that half of all instances spun up in the last two years were on Graviton, it’s homemade Arm processor, and not on x86. If this trend continues, that’s bad news for Intel and AMD.
- The long knives are out for Nvidia. For the last two learning cycles, Nvidia was subject to negative rumors approximately one week before earnings. Both centered around the issues for its upcoming Blackwell processor generation, and both were denied by the company.
- Typically when Silicon Valley companies go to war, they face each other out in the open in a very public manner (like Jensen Huang used to do to Intel or what Steve Jobs did with Adobe). But it now looks like a whisper campaign is being started, presumably by jealous competitors. A healthy dose of skepticism now will be needed for every bit of bad news about the company.