Today marks the final day of 2025. For those who have closely followed the technology industry—particularly artificial intelligence—this year is difficult to explain as a simple twelve-month cycle. It felt less like a single year and more like multiple phases of transition compressed into one unusually dense period.
Over the course of 2025, the AI industry passed through at least four structural inflection points.
First, competition shifted from model performance to operational cost.
Second, the ecosystem moved from research-centered innovation to industry-scale infrastructure.
Third, platform expansion gave way to questions of control, regulation, and governance.
And fourth, AI discourse expanded beyond technology into the domains of national policy, capital allocation, and energy.
Korea IT Times has documented this transition not as a simple sequence of events, but as a shift in the center of gravity of industry itself.
Throughout 2025, we connected artificial intelligence, semiconductors, energy, and policy through in-depth reporting, structural analysis, and data-driven examinations of global regulation, investment, and supply chains—returning again and again to a single question.
Not, “How fast is this technology?”
But rather, “What kind of order is this technology creating?”
Early in the year, the Stargate announcement by OpenAI and the shock triggered by China’s DeepSeek made one point unmistakably clear: the core of AI competition no longer lies in algorithms alone, but in supply chains, capital strength, and national strategy. That direction was reinforced by a series of defining moments—Elon Musk’s unveiling of Grok 3, the introduction of the “AI factory” concept at NVIDIA GTC 2025, the multimodal reset declared at Google I/O 2025, and Meta Platforms’ acquisition of Scale AI. Each pointed toward the same conclusion.
AI is no longer primarily a contest of technology, but a question of which actors can sustain it as an industry.
That shift reached a clear turning point with the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, followed almost immediately by an industry-wide “code red.” Performance gaps narrowed rapidly. In their place, inference cost, deployment speed, industrial integration, and regulatory resilience emerged as the decisive criteria for survival. In 2025, AI moved decisively beyond laboratories and demos, becoming firmly embedded as industrial infrastructure.
Throughout this transition, Korea IT Times has consistently delivered one message. The axis of the AI industry is shifting
from training to inference,
from model competition to agents and operational automation,
and from platform expansion to competition over energy, semiconductors, and data-center infrastructure.
This is precisely why we have treated semiconductor tariffs, data sovereignty debates, power supply constraints, cooling systems, and carbon regulation as integral to our AI coverage. AI is no longer a topic confined to the IT section; it has become a common variable cutting across industry, policy, and national strategy.
Looking ahead to 2026, the question naturally arises: what will rise, and what will fade?
According to Korea IT Times’ analysis, the winners of 2026—the Year of the Fire Horse—are unlikely to be companies showcasing the most dazzling technologies. Instead, the center of gravity will shift toward three less glamorous but structurally decisive domains.
First, low-power, cost-efficient AI inference semiconductors and systems. Competitive advantage will be defined not by a single large-scale training run, but by the ability to process millions of inferences per day at minimal cost and with high stability.
Second, industry-specific AI agents and automation software. As general-purpose AI rapidly commoditizes, real revenue will accrue to narrowly focused, deeply embedded AI solutions in manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and law.
Third, power, energy, and cooling infrastructure. AI data centers are no longer viewed as IT facilities, but are increasingly being reclassified as national infrastructure.
Conversely, 2026 will be unforgiving of vague claims of “doing AI.” Undifferentiated general-purpose services, platforms disconnected from real industrial workflows, and companies that have treated AI primarily as a marketing language will come under mounting pressure. 2026 will no longer allow questions to remain unspoken.
Where is AI deployed?
What does it cost to operate?
And into what form of industrial value is it converted?
AI that cannot answer these questions with numbers will rapidly lose competitiveness.
In 2026, Korea IT Times will continue to favor structural analysis over speed, and industrial language over fleeting buzzwords. Rather than producing more articles, we will focus on delivering fewer pieces with deeper context. Helping our readers avoid being swept up by technological waves—and instead equipping them with a compass to read direction—remains the most distinctive value we seek to provide.
We extend our sincere gratitude to all readers who accompanied us throughout 2025. In the year ahead, Korea IT Times will remain by your side—not chasing the speed of technology, but explaining the structure of change that lies beneath it.
Korean version available here.
