The 10 Biggest AI News Stories Of 2025

The AI industry in 2025 saw big-money acquisitions, advancements in virtual assistants and agent orchestration, and new innovations in hardware.

Technological Iceberg as the beginning of Artificial Intelligence and the new tech advent investment or hidden uncertainty of AI that lies beneath the surface with 3D illustration elements.

Big-money acquisitions. Advancements in virtual assistants and agent orchestration. And innovations in the hardware powering this new enterprise AI era.

This was some of the biggest AI news to hit the channel in 2025. As solution providers invest in growing their expertise around AI to meet new customer demand and better serve customers as trusted advisers on business transformation through technology—not to mention leveraging AI tools internally to bring down operating expenses and increase productivity—the biggest AI vendors in the world likewise have put time and money into boosting product portfolios, rolling out new pricing models and product packaging, and bringing new enablement and training resources to their armies of partners.

The measures of AI’s effects on 2025 can’t be understated. Investment in information processing equipment and software was responsible for 92 percent of GDP growth in the first half of this year, according to Harvard University professor and economist Jason Furman. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook parent Meta, Tesla, Nvidia and Microsoft are spending more than $300 billion on AI in 2025, according to Reuters.

[RELATED: The 10 Coolest Agentic AI Platforms And AI Products Of 2025]

The 10 Biggest AI News Stories Of 2025

In November, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that in the last 12 months, adoption of generative AI technology increased by 10 percentage points to 54.6 percent. That adoption rate three years after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT compares with the 19.7 percent adoption rate of the PC in 1984, three years after IBM released the first mass-market computer. That rate is also higher than the internet’s 30.1 percent adoption rate in 1998, three years after the internet was opened to commercial traffic.

In the last 12 months, work adoption increased from 33.3 percent to 37.4 percent. PC work adoption was 25.1 percent three years into its mass-market use, according to the bank.

Plenty of experts are forecasting contribution from AI on the economy in 2026. Vanguard sees AI investment helping give the U.S. a modest GDP growth acceleration to about 2.25 percent. The firm estimates that the U.S. will grow 1.9 percent when 2025 is done.

Read on for more of the AI news stories that captured the attention of CRN reporters and the channel in 2025, ranked in ascending order to what we felt was the most important AI news for the channel this year.

MSP Tool Vendors Embed AI

AI continued its penetration not only in consumer and enterprise technology, but in tools MSPs and solution providers use to manage and service customers.

Generative AI, virtual assistants and AI agents showed up in products offered by some of the biggest legacy players in the channel tools market as well as younger upstarts looking to usher solution providers into a new era of operational efficiency and lower overhead costs.

Some of the biggest advancements in MSP tools adding AI capabilities include:

Mass Layoffs As Companies Invest In AI

Every industry is waiting to see how AI affects their workforces—with some employers eyeing potential overhead savings from fewer human workers and some employees worried about getting replaced by AI automation.

This year saw some of the biggest technology vendors reallocate capital toward meeting current AI demand and future AI opportunity while downsizing less divisions seeing less success or that no longer need the capacity added back during the pandemic. The result: mass layoffs.

Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Oracle, Microsoftand Dell Technologies were among the vendors to make cuts this year. While some vendors explicitly acknowledged investment reallocation into AI as a reason for the mass layoffs, others chalked layoffs up to standard business evaluations.

Vendors applied these cuts to areas ranging from human resources to user experience to non-AI engineering and sales divisions, CRN found in its reporting throughout 2025 on the layoffs.

To be clear, these layoffs seem to follow a reallocation of capital as opposed to AI tools taking the place of human workers. But as the AI era moves further along in innovation, it’s possible the story could change and AI finally starts automating away whole positions, let alone boring manual tasks.

Nvidia’s Ascendence, Intel’s Struggles

The AI infrastructure hype of 2025 helped Nvidia become the first company in history to exceed $5 trillion in market capitalization in October after becoming the first company to break $4 trillion in July. Its market cap was about $4.2 trillion Wednesday.

Nvidia’s influence on the technology market in 2025didn’t even necessarily come from outright acquisitions. Its Gretel purchase in March for more than over $320 million, for example, pales in comparison to some of the investment deals it made such as its $100 billion investment in OpenAI announced in September, a $2 billion investment in Synopsys in December and $1 billion in Nokia disclosed in October.

And Nvidia’s product innovations from 2025 ranged from its DGX Spark mini desktop PC powered by a smaller version of its Grace Blackwell Superchip to the Blackwell Ultra GPU aimed at AI reasoning models. Its RTX Pro servers could represent a multibillion-dollar opportunity for the channel because they are aimed at the many enterprise data centers that have traditionally run on CPU-only servers and are now coming due for a refresh.

The chipmaker is also set up well for 2026 with expected releases including the Rubin GPU architecture and the liquid-cooled Vera Rubin NVL144 platform.

The evolution of 32-year-old Nvidia from a chip designer focused on video games to an enterprise infrastructure powerhouse that is enabling the AI era notably comes while 56-year-old legacy chipmaker Intel continues to experience twists and turns as it seeks a starring role in the AI era.

Intel, which helped build the PC era with its CPUs, has navigated mass layoffs, major executive exitsand difficultysecuring external customers for its Foundry contract chip manufacturing business. At one point, Intel looked like it might have to let fo of CEO Lip-Bu Tan when President Donald Trump called for his removal from the role. The two appear to have squashed their beef, with the U.S. government even getting a 10 percent stake in Intel.

Nvidia, like Intel, has worked to ensure it maintains the head seat at the AI table, even fightingfor the ability to export chips and giving the U.S. a percent cut of its China sales revenue.

Nvidia and Intel’s rivalry took somewhat of a backseat in 2025 with a deal by Nvidia to invest $5 billion in Intel common stock and inking a joint development deal that includes Intel designing a custom CPU to serve as the host for an x86 version of Nvidia’s power-hungry rack-scale computing platforms.

Big-Money Vendor AI Acquisitions

Alongside organic innovation of AI products, technology vendors also spent billions of dollars acquiring cutting-edge AI upstarts and even established players to improve AI offers.

Some of the biggest AI-related acquisitions of the year include:

Some AI acquisitions announced in 2025 but slated to close next year include:

The deals not only arm solution providers with AI products carrying more value from their vendor partners, they also open up new cross-selling and up-selling potential as each of these vendors integrate acquired assets into their existing portfolios.

Solution Providers Build AI Practices

The AI opportunity for the channel led to multiple solution providers investing in frameworks, applications and practices around the cutting-edge technology as new sales opportunities with customers are created.

And investment in AI demand and opportunity ran from the largest global systems integrators down to more regional or industry-focused solution providers.

Examples of AI practice creation and growth experienced by solution providers in 2025 include:

Solution Providers Buy Innovative AI Practices

Technology vendors weren’t the only companies making major acquisitions to inorganically boost AI capabilities. Solution providers themselves also turned to consolidation to better meet customer demand.

Some of the biggest solution provider acquisitions in 2025 with the stated goal of improving AI prowess included:

We’ll see if 2026 sees even more solution provider consolidation as partners try to navigate emerging business models and expertise demands of the AI era.

Hardware Advancements From AI Factories To AI PCs

A wide range of innovations from 2025 can get filed under the umbrella of AI hardware advancement as 2026 will shape up to see more workloads move to the edge.

Vendors including Nvidia, HPE, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies and Ingram Micro have worked on and partnered to build “AI factory” industrial-scale computing systems for developing, deploying and managing AI models in just one example.

Chip giants including Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD showcased incredible advancements in the semiconductors powering the AI era—but the huge amount of demand for AI chips and the potential for lowering the cost of AI also led technology giants such as Google and Amazon Web Services to go further down the path of developing their own AI chips.

While not quite the major inflection point of bringing AI PCs into the mainstream, Microsoft endingWindows 10 support in October—with some options to pay for continued updates—added another push for some solution providers’ AI PC sales motions.

Some end users, it should be said, are still not yet ready for AI PCs to take workloads to the edge or don’t want to spend the extra money on the pricier computers. But multiple solution providers told CRN this year that the end of Windows 10 support plus the natural age-out of computers bought amid the flurry of remote work during the pandemic opened up conversations around who would need an AI PC in 2025 and 2026 and when’s the best time to make the purchase.

It also gave solution providers with new fleet management capabilities a chance to dazzle customers.

Microsoft also invested in more AI and agentic capabilities in Windows 11 even for those who don’t have an AI PC. Time will tell whether the move gets users more excited about what AI can do for an operating system—or whether it leads to people deciding not to shell out the money for a Copilot+ AI PC with new agentic capabilities on their existing PCs.

Still, for solution providers and end users ready to transition to an AI PC, OEMs had plenty of new models to showcase in 2025, with standout devices from HP, Lenovo, Dell and Microsoft itself.

AI Agents And Tools To Manage Them

American AI innovation received a rude awakening at the start of 2025 when China-based AI lab DeepSeek rocked markets with a model that appeared just as capable as ones made by U.S. companies at a fraction of the cost.

But American AI vendors appear to have answered the challenge with a deluge of AI advancements across services and applications. The popularity this year of two open particular protocols—Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP, released in November 2024 but seeing adoption acceleration this year) and Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A, released in April 2025)—standardized how AI agents communicate and increased AI system interoperability, a major factor in the innovation seen throughout the year.

Multiple solution providers have told CRN this year that the rate of AI advancements has been so fast and so voluminous that it can be hard to keep up with releases and education around the new offers and, ironically, some customers might be pausing AI investments to see if the dust settles.

New and updated AI-powered virtual assistant products came from Zoom, Microsoft, Red Hat, Omnissa, Cisco, Ericsson and even solution providers like NWN that took human-AI interactions to a new level aimed at productivity gains and eliminating dry manual work.

IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow, TD Synnex, Google, Salesforce, Palo Alto Networks, Boomi, Okta, SailPoint and Snykwere among the vendors to dedicate engineering prowess into better ways to orchestrate, govern and manage the AI agents popping up in enterprises to take actions on behalf of their human users in an effort to prevent sprawl, unwanted data access and shadow IT.

Solution providers including DXC Technologyhave also rolled out agent orchestration products—perhaps a sign that the best solution providers in the AI era will leverage the technology to author their own intellectual property in addition to acting as a trusted adviser to their clients.

Microsoft, OpenAI Disentanglement

In October, Microsoft and OpenAI revised their agreement to allow for more freedom by the technology giant and the ChatGPT maker whose models help power some of Microsoft’s AI applications and services.

Changes to their agreement included:

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella publicly characterized the new agreement as creating “more certainty” around the companies’ intellectual property relationship.

The new agreement marks “the next chapter in what is one of the most successful partnerships and investments our industry has ever seen,” the CEO said, with Microsoft seeing 10 times the return on its OpenAI investment, and OpenAI has contracted an incremental $250 billion of Azure services.

“This is a great milestone for both companies,” Nadella said. “We continue to benefit mutually from each other’s growth across multiple dimensions.”

Growing excitement and adoption of AI applications and services helped Microsoft become the second company in history to break $4 trillion in market capitalization, which happened in July. The vendor’s market cap was down to about $3.5 trillion Wednesday.

AI Bubble Concerns

This year has seen a decided increase in conversation and concern around whether the AI industry is in a bubble and whether that bubble is bound to pop in the near future.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology report published in August that found 95 percent of organizations see zero return on their investment into generative AI was referenced time and time again in 2025, including on earnings calls and in conference keynotes by executives with Salesforce and Microsoft—even with the MIT study basing its findings on only 52 structured interviews across enterprise stakeholders, a systematic analysis of 300-plus public AI initiatives and announcements and surveys with 153 leaders.

Adding to the concerns are multiple so-called “circular deals” where a small group of AI chip providers, model makers and cloud computing providers do business with each other and use investments from one another to buy each other’s products.

The deals include:

An October report from Harvard chalks up the circular deals to the sheer volume of investment capital and computing power needed to meet AI demand and the AI opportunity. A lack of actual consumer demand at the end of the deal-making would mean an eventual burst to the bubble.

Technology experts from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna to ServiceNow President and CFO Gina Mastantuono continue to push back against AI bubble fears.

Huang in November emphasized that AI has “reached a tipping point and is transforming existing applications while enabling entirely new ones for existing applications” and is “replacing classical machine learning in search ranking, recommender systems, ad targeting, click-through prediction [and] content moderation.”

The AI field continues to have room to grow, Huang said, pointing to physical AI as an upcoming wave in the field.

In October, Krishna pushed back against bubble talk by pointing out that the fiber infrastructure rush around the 2000 dot-com bubble continues to pay off today even if those companies saw public market investment pull back.

“I don’t think we are in a bubble,” Krishna said. “If something is expensive, a limited number may get a correction, but not the vast market. A bubble means that you’re going to get a crash and then things are going to regress backwards about four, five, seven years. And that means it takes that much time to get out of it.”

A J.P. Morgan report from October agreed with Krishna’s take, saying that hyperscalers have been flushed with healthy free cash flows and robust margins compared with the dot-com companies that financed buildouts mostly with external capital and that AI demand continues to outpace supply.

Data center utilization levels are at about 80 percent, whereas at the dot-com era’s peak, only about 7 percent of the fiber-optic network was used, according to the report.

Krishna called AI bigger than the internet, with investments in the technology bound to pay off in the future—even if not the immediate future.

Mastantuono told CRN in October that ServiceNow is embedding AI into how it works, seeing meaningful productivity benefits in shortening the time tasks take. “It’s not a bubble,” she said. “It’s a revolution.”