End of Year: Our Top Ten Predictions for 2025

Below are the ten calls we are willing to put on the public record for 2025. Each is dated, each is falsifiable, and each will be graded in our 2025-W52 audit alongside the rest of the year's posts.

1. DeepSeek triggers a Nvidia repricing event inside Q1

A DeepSeek release in late December 2024 or January 2025 triggers a single-day Nvidia drawdown in the high-single-digit to low-double-digit percent range, on the trading session following the release. The re-rating of the China lab class is permanent.

2. Anthropic closes a primary round at $60B+ before March 31

The next Anthropic round prices in the sixty-to-seventy-billion-dollar band. The round closes before the end of Q1. Gulf sovereign capital takes a named position inside the round.

3. Stargate-style $500B headline announced by inauguration window

The incoming Trump administration co-announces a five-hundred-billion dollar AI infrastructure commitment alongside SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle. The headline number is the point. The Gulf gets re-rated as the only credible non-US partner pool at that capex tier.

4. MBZUAI publishes an R1-class open-weight reasoning model

Before December 31, MBZUAI and TII co-publish an open-weight reasoning model at DeepSeek-R1 parity on MATH and HumanEval, with native Arabic chain-of-thought as the structural differentiator.

5. The Saudi-Trump tour locks $50B+ in announced commitments

The Trump administration's first Saudi state visit produces fifty billion dollars or more in publicly announced AI, energy, and defense commitments. PIF anchors the AI tranche.

6. Cursor IPOs or files for IPO inside H2 2025

Cursor either files for a US listing or announces a roadshow inside H2 2025. The narrative frames Cursor as the first AI-native developer tools company to reach public-markets scale.

7. MCP becomes the de-facto plugin standard for agents

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol crosses ten thousand published servers inside 2025. OpenAI, Google, and at least one Gulf-anchored agent platform ship MCP-compatible runtimes during the year.

8. Veo 3 ships and wins the AI-video category

Google ships Veo 3 inside H1 2025. The model wins the AI-video category by year end on quality benchmarks. Sora and Runway either ship competitive responses or visibly fall behind.

9. Voice agents beat chat in MENA SMB by end of year

By Q4 2025, voice-first AI agents overtake chat-based AI agents as the deployment default for SMB customer service in MENA. WhatsApp voice plus Arabic-native models is the load-bearing combination.

10. The 2025 AI talent shortage hits the Gulf first

Gulf compensation packages for senior AI engineering talent cross one million US dollars at the median by end of 2025. MBZUAI graduates, G42 senior engineers, and Falcon team members all see two-to-three-x offers from US-based competitors.

What this means for the Gulf

The 2025 calls cluster around three themes that matter for GCC operators.

First, the US AI capital cycle re-engages the Gulf as a named partner pool. PIF, ADIA, Mubadala, and Humain all see public participation in US frontier rounds inside the year.

Second, the sovereign AI build accelerates. MBZUAI publishes credible reasoning research. G42 expands. The Falcon roadmap delivers. The Gulf-anchored stack stops being a regional novelty and becomes a sovereign-grade alternative inside the year.

Third, the talent market tightens hard. The Gulf operators who built genuine technical depth inside 2024 win the 2025 procurement conversations. The operators who positioned on slideware lose.

We will grade these ten calls publicly in 2025-W52, with full credit where we land verified, partial credit where the direction is right but the magnitude or timing slipped, and a flat "wrong" verdict where we missed. The point of publishing the list now is that the next reader can hold us to every claim.