The Top 10 Cloud Infra Stories of 2025

What a year it’s been! In cloud infrastructure, there's been a firehose of ongoing news that doesn’t look to be stopping anytime soon. AI, AI, and more AI is featured in headlines daily. Key players, including NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, and many others are tracked closely, the words of their management moving markets up or down.

At Futuriom, we’ve spent our careers tracking the tech markets, and we think it’s a special time, unprecedented in our experience. As the year ends, we’ve scrutinized what we think are the top trends in cloud and communications technology. See them below, ranked in order from 10 to 1 (with 1 ranked first in importance in our estimation). Read on, and let us know what you think at [email protected]

10. Hyperscalers Adopt Multicloud. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle are acknowledging that most large customers are using more than one of their ilk. While this trend has been building for a few years, it was never more evident than when AWS and Google recently announced a mutual connectivity service at AWS re:Invent. The service is still in public preview in a limited number of regions. But enterprise customers could see potential benefits from this and follow-on services, though a connection service between AWS and archrival Azure may be farther in the future.

9. The U.S. Government Swings into Tech. From the outset of his administration, U.S. President Donald Trump has prioritized a broader establishment of technology products and services on American soil. The Stargate project, announced in January 2025, put OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank in the spotlight as leading developers of a $500 billion planned datacenter buildout. In August, the government pledged to invest billions in Intel. In 2026, expect to see more government involvement in the tech sector, particularly in AI, where Trump recently announced the lifting of state and local restrictions on the technology.

8. Neoclouds Shift into Power. The rise of AI made 2025 the year of the alternative cloud provider that specializes in renting accelerated computing infrastructure for AI development. The subject of a recent report from Futuriom, the neoclouds have grabbed the spotlight due to their audacious scale. The splashiest neocloud projects are campuses costing billions and designed to consume gigawatts of power. The surge propelled neocloud-related IPOs by CoreWeave and WhiteFiber, though market results have proved volatile (more on CoreWeave in a moment).

7. An NVIDIA Mafia Takes Shape. This year, NVIDIA invested billions of dollars in a series of companies—not acquiring them but taking a significant stake. The roster includes Synopsys, in which NVIDIA invested $2 billion; Intel, $5 billion; OpenAI, $100 billion; and Nokia, $1 billion. NVIDIA also invested in numerous other companies, including Mistral AI, Wayve, and Reflection AI. With friends like these, NVIDIA is lining up technology (and favors) without the hassle or even bigger cost of buying multiple firms.

6. Ethernet Wins in AI Networking. Futuriom research indicates that Ethernet is becoming the dominant, preferred network fabric for AI, overcoming traditional limitations to outperform. Momentum has grown in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), with the larges players including Arista Networks, Cisco, and Nvidia adopting RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to connect the most massive AI clusters as well as inference infrastructure. When NVIDIA joined the UEC back in 2024, it showed an awareness that Ethernet was ascending in AI networking. Sure enough, sales of NVIDIA’s own enhanced Ethernet networking solution, Spectrum-X, grew 162% last quarter. NVIDIA doesn’t break out sales of its proprietary InfiniBand network solutions for comparison, but the robust Ethernet sales shows who’s winning in enterprise AI networking.

5. CoreWeave’s Bubble Bursts. When CoreWeave went public in March 2025, it seemed nothing could stop it. Investments from NVIDIA, pledges of billions from OpenAI, all pointed upward. Then came November, when the company lowered its revenue and capex guidance. CoreWeave also lost its attempt to buy Core Scientific. And its debt continues to grow. Bottom line? 2026 could be a turnaround—or turndown—year.

4. Cisco Gets Back in the Game. Cisco’s corporate restructuring at the end of 2024, which put Jeetu Patel at the helm of Cisco’s Networking, Security, and Collaboration units, as well as its pivot toward AI infrastructure and a partnership with NVIDIA, are starting to pay dividends. Recent earnings show the company has made enormous progress in addressing flaws in its strategy that we pointed out in June of 2024. In short, Cisco seems to have regained its footing in key markets, and 2026 should be a proving ground.

3. Hyperscalers Grow Their Own Chips. Unwilling to rely on the whims of NVIDIA and its suppliers, the leading cloud providers have developed (or are developing) their own chips, with some significant results. AWS’s Trainium has launched successfully. Anthropic has agreed to use up to 1 million Google TPUs. Chip competition is also growing with AMD. And a growing roster of startups are gathering like clouds on NVIDIA’s horizon.

2. OpenAI Lands in the Center of AI Bubble Fears. There is concern about the role of OpenAI in the AI market, given its position in a circular pattern of spending in which NVIDIA, Oracle, CoreWeave, and others are funneling billions into datacenter buildouts on pledges from OpenAI. Yet OpenAI is reportedly on track to burn an estimated $8.5 billion in cash this year despite expecting to score $13 billion in annual sales. And it doesn’t anticipate profitability until 2029 or 2030.

1. Oracle Rises, then Falls, on Datacenter Deals. Like CoreWeave, Oracle spent much of 2025 riding high on AI. As part of the Stargate project, the company pledged 4.5 GW of AI compute capacity to OpenAI in a deal worth $300 billion. But a recent report, denied by the company, alleges that Blue Owl Capital, one of Oracle’s backers for a big datacenter in Michigan, has pulled out of the deal due to concerns about Oracle’s mounting debt and AI spending. As of this writing, Oracle’s stock had fallen 19% over the past month. Will 2026 reverse the trend? We’ll see.

The Futuriom Take: Happy holidays to all!