2025 is almost behind us! Before we step into 2026, we are taking a moment to look back at what investors were most curious about in 2025.
Global markets this year swung between record peaks and periodic turbulence. U.S. equities hit record highs, while unexpected events such as DeepSeek's debut, unpredictable U.S. tariffs, and growing concerns over an AI bubble kept investors cautious.
In this article, we highlight 10 key trends based on analysis of the Third Bridge Library database, alongside discussions with our analysts and expert insights.
IME
1. Data Center
Anthony DeRuijter, Global Team Lead for IME at Third Bridge, explained that AI is highly power-intensive, and U.S. electricity demand is rising far above recent historic averages, driven by data center growth and broader electrification trends. Investors are interested because electricity access could become a major bottleneck for massive data center spending. Nuclear energy is also attracting investor interest as a potential energy solution for data centers. Cooling is another key area of focus, which ties directly into our industrials coverage, Vertiv, for example.
Experts we interviewed expect M&A activity in gas-fired power plants to continue, led by major independent power producers (IPPs) such as NRG Energy, Vistra, Constellation Energy, and Talen Energy, with major private equity funds following along.
Combined-cycle gas is viewed as the most reliable way to meet growing data center demand, and players are positioning themselves to secure generation capacity and priority access to data center offtakes at attractive pricing. Renewables may lag due to the current administration’s less supportive stance, but they will continue to attract interest as overall power demand rises.
Looking ahead to 2026, experts anticipate that the broader focus will likely be on existing generation that can deliver immediately, as new-build projects continue to face headwinds from supply chain constraints, limited development resources, and labour challenges.
Quote from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“I think there are a lot of project announcements that, quite frankly, are wishful thinking and not real.”
US Gas-fired Thermal Power – Capacity Growth & Suitability for Powering Data Centres, Apr 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
2. Offshore wind
The offshore wind industry entered a turbulent year in 2025. According to Peter McNally, Global Head of Sector Analysts at Third Bridge, President Trump’s cancellation of US offshore wind projects, along with Ørsted’s portfolio setbacks, share-price collapse, and forced capital raise, have all intensified scrutiny on the sector.
Industry experts we spoke to expect a marked slowdown in the US offshore wind sector over the next five years, with projected growth rates halved to 12–15%. They note that government policy remains a massive factor in all regions, while cost competitiveness continues to be a challenge. Although there is state-level support in the US, federal opposition still looms large.
Quote from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“I would expect the development of new projects to be more or less put on hold until there is greater clarity both at the federal level but also greater clarity of whether or not the existing construction projects are in fact delivered to expectations.”
The Future of US Offshore Wind – Capacity Growth Outlook & Litigation Risks, Nov 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
TMT
3. Agentic AI
According to Phillip Atkinson, Sector Analyst, Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT), at Third Bridge, Agentic AI became a hot topic in 2025 amid fears of an AI bubble, prompting investors to seek tangible use cases for AI. Hyperscalers, software vendors, and emerging neo clouds are also committing billions of dollars of capital expenditure to enable agentic functionality. Private markets are backing companies with billion-dollar valuations such as n8n. There is growing concern that agentic systems could disintermediate established players, including Teleperformance, Foundever, Wolters Kluwer, and UiPath.
Conversations with our industry experts point to a cautious sentiment. Monetisation remains largely unproven, and competition is likely to erode any pricing power. Although hyperscalers are increasingly viewed as the preferred platform for building agents given their embedded role within customer technology stacks. Looking into 2026, most experts we spoke with expect monetisation to remain difficult and to plateau, even though agentic capabilities may still become necessary for competitive differentiation.
Quote from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“CFOs appear cautious when transitioning from the exploration phase to full implementation…When it comes to results and signing off on things, I think probably the numbers would be on the lower end’ [20-30%].”
Agentic AI for ERP Software – How Vendors & ISVs are Competing for the Future of Automation, Sept 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
4. AI Chips
Nvidia hit a new milestone in October, becoming the world’s first $5 trillion company, driven by its dominance in the AI race as the first to bring a server-grade GPU to market for AI workloads. But that dominance is under threat, with the company losing more than $250 billion in market value after reports that Meta is in advanced talks to deploy Google’s Ironwood TPU v7 in its data centers for training and inference.
“The latest generation, Ironwood TPU v7, has created a stir in the headlines, as it could rival Nvidia’s long-held dominance in the AI race,” said William McGonigle, Senior Sector Analyst (Semiconductor) at Third Bridge. “Both Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s frontier model were trained on Google TPUs, marking the first major deviation from Nvidia GPUs for large-scale frontier model training.”
Investors are digging deeper than just who is winning between GPUs and TPUs, also searching the underlying technology and supply chain, including SerDes, DPU, HBM, and CoWoS.
Third Bridge experts note that Broadcom maintains a 6-12 month lead in SerDes IP, particularly for 200G-plus applications, reflected in design wins with roughly 80% of high-speed switching customers and 10-20% pricing premiums versus Marvell. Memory makers such as Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are shifting toward higher-margin, higher-volume HBM production while exiting consumer DRAM, NAND, and SSD markets, driving material intensity per wafer and keeping ASPs elevated until at least 2027. Experts also highlight CoWoS capacity as the best indicator of accelerator shipment volumes and market share.
2026 is expected to be a pivotal year in the GPU-versus-ASIC race. ASIC shipments are forecast to double in 2026 after posting double-digit growth in 2025, but their lower revenue per unit means overall revenue share is unlikely to shift proportionally. Training compute is projected to see “mid-teen percentage” growth in ASIC share next year, marking what some experts describe as a “pre-inflection year” for ASIC adoption.
Despite the acceleration, ASICs still face structural constraints. Only hyperscalers can afford to design and deploy them at scale, leaving enterprises, governments and most other buyers reliant on GPUs. GPUs also retain an advantage in flexibility for multimodal AI workloads, with custom ASICs tailored to specific modalities not expected to emerge until 2027–2028.
Quote from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“If we were to see a pullback in demand or a correction in markets due to bubble fears, not just Google, [but] any of the hyperscalers are much better off in terms of being able to weather this compared to somebody like a neocloud, such as CoreWeave, Fluidstack, or Lambda, because they (the neoclouds) are building capacity that they themselves don’t have any use for internally. Someone like Amazon, Microsoft, etc., can all use GPUs in their internal workloads, and the offerings they have allow them to amortize the cost of building over time.”
Google – TPU Update, GPU System Consumption Trends & CAPEX Outlook, Dec 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
Healthcare
5. GLP-1
GLP-1 captured media headlines in healthcare investment throughout 2025. According to Sebastian Skeet, VP, Healthcare at Third Bridge, most notably because Novo Nordisk’s shares have slumped, down 52% year to date and roughly 70% from their peak, after losing first-mover advantage and market share to Eli Lilly and facing recent pipeline setbacks.
The GLP-1 sector is unprecedented in the pharmaceutical world, with rapid price evolution and expanding direct-to-consumer and compounding channels, even as obesity reimbursement remains limited. Oral GLP-1s are set to launch in 2026, including Lilly’s orforglipron and Novo’s 25mg oral semaglutide, complementing a broad pipeline that includes Zealand, Amgen, Roche, AbbVie, Pfizer and Viking. The industry has also seen notable M&A activity, exemplified by the high-profile Pfizer–Novo bidding contest for Metsera. While the US remains the largest market, easing supply chain constraints is expected to enable significant launches internationally.
Conversations with our experts suggest that the GLP-1 market will continue to evolve rapidly into 2026. In the US, compounding is expected to remain a permanent feature of the market, likely capturing even more volume share as prices decline and new non-injectable formulations are introduced. Oral therapies are also projected to play an increasingly prominent role, with roughly a third of patients in specialist care and half in primary care expected to be treated with orals. Among these, Lilly’s orforglipron is anticipated to capture the majority share, benefiting from no fasting requirements and clear scalability advantages compared with oral semaglutide. Looking at the broader pipeline, while many assets are under development targeting specific niches based on efficacy, safety, and comorbidity benefits, experts widely view Lilly’s retatrutide as the one to watch, with recent data suggesting a potentially best-in-class weight loss profile, although this will have to be ratified in 2026 when additional studies read out.1 Beyond clinical profiles, commercial factors such as price, reimbursement, and patient access are expected to play an equally, if not more, critical role in determining uptake.
Quotes from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“These self-insured employers, they're switching to the compounding. That will bring a huge change to the proportion [of patients on compounded GLP-1s]. In my experience, the majority are going to be on compounded [GLP-1s], actually, in the next few years”
US GLP-1 Compounding – Regulatory Framework, Unit Economics & Implications for Branded GLP-1 Market Growth, Nov 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
6. AI/ML drug discovery
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have the potential to revolutionize drug discovery and development through algorithms that can analyze massive amounts of biological and chemical data to identify new drug targets, while also significantly improving success rates tied to predicted drug properties.
However, industry experts say that AI/ML drug development companies continue to struggle. They argue AI may be more effective at optimizing molecules than identifying targets, with its greatest strength in designing small and large molecules due to abundant training data. Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind lead the field in protein structure prediction, with their model accuracy and team quality making them difficult to surpass.
AI drug discovery companies are struggling to differentiate themselves because they lack real data proving that their proprietary technology is superior to competitors. Companies must narrow their focus and advance clinical candidates to prove the viability of their platforms and secure future funding. Our experts expect a wave of consolidation in the AI-driven drug discovery sector in 2025–26.
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
Financial
7. Stablecoins
Stablecoins have quickly become a hot topic among investors this year, with the market estimated at around $275bn and expected to more than double over the next two to three years.
Jonathan King, Sector Analyst (Fintech & Payments) at Third Bridge, says stablecoins present a meaningful disintermediation risk to traditional financial infrastructure by enabling value transfer without banks, card networks, or correspondent banking relationships. By allowing consumers, merchants, and enterprises to hold and settle digital dollars directly on-chain, stablecoins can bypass conventional rails such as SWIFT, ACH, and credit-card networks, reducing costs and speeding up settlement. That threatens fee-based revenue streams tied to cross-border payments, acquiring, and deposit float.
Experts view this period as the first significant shift from stablecoins being a theoretical threat to becoming an operational reality in global payments. Visa expects that every institution moving money will ultimately need a stablecoin strategy.2 Adoption is forecast to be fastest in cross-border and high-value B2B flows — including corporate-treasury movements, supplier payments, and large international transfers — where stablecoins can materially cut costs and settlement times and deliver clearer benefits than in consumer retail.
The greatest risk to Visa and Mastercard, our experts say, is merchant-led adoption, as platforms such as Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify have strong incentives to route payments over lower-cost stablecoin rails and reshape checkout economics. Still, experts note that Visa is not standing still, it is integrating stablecoin settlement, tokenisation and risk/authentication tools into its network in an effort to remain the on-/off-ramp and service layer for these flows rather than be bypassed by them.
Stablecoin penetration is expected to expand meaningfully through 2026, particularly in cross-border and B2B use cases, creating both competitive pressure and new service-layer monetisation opportunities for payment networks.
Quotes from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“There’s certainly the possibility of stablecoins being a meaningful threat and reducing Visa’s network volumes, particularly as it applies to cross-border, but I think that it’s really less of an impact than some folks would have you suggest. That threat becomes credible depending on how stablecoins are used. They’re trying to improve cost efficiency by bypassing many of the steps and intermediaries that are traditionally associated with card networks, including interchange and assessment fees.”
Visa – Cross-border Payments & Value-added Services Growth Outlook, July 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
8. Crypto
Jacob Zuller, Sector Analyst (Financial) at Third Bridge, says traditional financial institutions are increasingly recognising the use of blockchain to speed up transactions, settlement, and liquidity, while stablecoins have gained momentum following the passage of the GENIUS Act and Circle’s listing in June. Alongside rising crypto trading activity, asset tokenisation is starting to reshape parts of the financial system, with Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood among the firms developing related infrastructure.
Experts say there is still considerable room for growth, with institutional adoption expected to pick up in late 2026 and into 2027 as regulation becomes clearer. The GENIUS Act is seen as an initial step, with further measures such as the Clarity Act expected to follow. Trading volumes are forecast to grow at double-digit rates, led by Coinbase, with Kraken and Gemini close behind. Binance is expected to face challenges expanding in the US and increasing competition in Asia and the Middle East. Our experts also expect further consolidation, as centralised exchanges seek to control a larger share of the ecosystem and expand into payments, where Base is viewed as relatively well positioned.
Quote from an expert interview in the Third Bridge Library:
“It's a huge opportunity, obviously, for Coinbase because it owns the wallet infrastructure that is integrated in x402. Then it owns Base as a transaction layer. It has ownership on USDC, which is like the token, the value vehicle. It could potentially then charge developers or providers with fees to build these wallets and maintain them and secure them. That could be quite interesting for Coinbase as a AWS for these transactions and offering a full stack. AWS just for crypto rails”
Coinbase – Payments, E-commerce & Base App Evolution, Aug 2025
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
Consumer
9. U.S. athletic footwear
Natasha Nair, Senior Analyst (Consumer) at Third Bridge, said investors were keenly interested in the US athletic footwear sector in 2025 because the market is in the middle of major disruption, including unexpected M&A activity, rapid changes in brand momentum, and shifting tariffs.
Footwear retail has been particularly exciting ever since Dick’s Sporting Goods announced its $4.6 billion acquisition of struggling retailer Foot Locker. Other notable deals in the sector include the unexpected $10.5 billion take-private transaction of Skechers by 3G Capital.
Third Bridge experts are optimistic about Nike's return to positive sales growth by fiscal 2027. Nike is preparing to launch new products over the next 12–18 months. The key question for 2026 is whether this wave of new products will be meaningful and aggressive enough for Nike to regain lost market share. Moreover, a strategic shift back to Amazon 1PL gives Nike greater control over product offerings and timing.
Based on conversations with our experts, On is expected to see double-digit growth in the short-term, but their wholesale growth may hit a ceiling around 2028. Continued explosive growth requires significant improvement in their D2C, specifically e-commerce, and their 20% EBITDA margin goal is likely more of an ambitious target than a reality. Despite heavy investments in operational efficiency, inventory management is flagged as the biggest risk, potentially leading to market-dirtying liquidation.
With the U.S. sourcing most of its sports footwear from Vietnam, and with slightly more clarity and stability on the U.S.-Vietnam tariff agreement, it’s important to assess the different scenarios manufacturers may face under the updated tariff structure in 2026.
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
10. Luxury
As Yanmei Tang, Senior Analyst (Luxury, Apparel, Footwear & Acc Design) at Third Bridge, highlighted in our July 2025 perspective, Sustained pressure amid structural challenges in the luxury sector, the global luxury market continues to face a structural slowdown after years of expansion.
Based on conversations with our experts, while European luxury groups such as LVMH, Kering, and Burberry exceeded market expectations in Q3 2025, showing early signs of recovery, overall consumer sentiment remains soft. Experts noted that CEO and creative changes are still bedding in, limiting sector visibility, and the broader backdrop remains mixed.
According to our experts, demand has weakened in 2025 as aspirational customers are priced out, while high-net-worth clients are spending more selectively. Years of price increases have reduced accessibility, and overexposure and product repetition have created brand fatigue. Consumers in the US and China are shifting toward understated or local luxury, leaving major global brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Burberry struggling to balance exclusivity with relevance.
Experts highlighted brands performing strongly include Hermès, which continues to grow at a steadier pace and retains strong collector interest; Brunello Cucinelli, where the Russia issue3 is seen as non-structural and discounting is well-controlled; Dior, benefiting from leather goods under JW Anderson; and Moncler, which faces “no real competitor.” Conversely, Gucci and Burberry remain under scrutiny, with experts questioning whether their current creative choices align with brand codes, trends, and commercial needs.
Further reading: see relevant transcripts and key insights here.
References:
2. https://www.ccn.com/news/business/visa-expands-stablecoin-initiatives/
All insights in this article are based on information shared by Third Bridge experts.
For media enquiries, please contact us at comms@thirdbridge.com.
