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2025 has been a weird year. All that stuff with Elon Musk running the US government and tariffs driving up prices. AI disrupting budgets if not businesses. Massive hacks and painful outages. And so on.
It’s difficult to quantify just how wild this year has been without numbers, so we’ve collected a stack of bewildering figures in an attempt to make it all add up. Here’s TechFinitive’s roundup of the year in number form.
When it comes to spending on AI, there’s a lot of numbers we could choose. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will spend a combined $350 billion on data centres this year – much of it for the burgeoning AI market – and that will continue with another $400bn in 2026.
Those are huge figures, and they’re climbing: according to Platformonomics, in 2024 capital expenditure spending was about $245bn and in 2023 about $155bn. Back in 2022, before ChatGPT went big, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta spent about $159bn on capex, not just cloud. That was up just 2.5% from the year before.
In other words, the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT took capex spend at some of the biggest companies and doubled it in a few years – not bad for a technology that still “hallucinates” facts.
Consider OpenAI’s own spending: the startup has made deal announcements worth $1.5 trillion over the past several months, covering the next few years of partnerships with the likes of Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.
That’s frankly bonkers for a company that is expected to post revenue of about $20 billion in 2025, and last year was struggling to find $6bn in funding from investors – and remember when Musk tried to buy OpenAI for $97 billion?
Late on a Sunday in October, the US-EAST-1Region for AWS started to fall over. This is a rather pressing problem as that area covers northern Virginia, a bit of a hotspot for data centres.
Amazon spotted the cause of the issue – DNS resolution issues, of course – just after midnight and a bit more than two hours later had rolled out a mitigation.
If only that was enough. Thanks to the complicated, interconnected nature of telecommunications and the cloud, everything fell down and went boom at hundreds of the biggest digital properties for 15 hours. That included Reddit, Signal, Slack, Zoom and even parts of Amazon, which naturally runs on its own cloud.
In all, reports point to disruption at tens of thousands of companies and eight million user reports to Downdetector, all thanks to a two-hour fault that sparked a 15-hour outage.
At the end of August, Jaguar Land Rover shut down production at its car manufacturing plants. Two days later, it announced why: a cyber incident forced the company to shut down its systems to fight back.
Here’s some wild figures: the incident directly cost JLR a whopping £196 million; the government offered a loan of £1.5 billion to keep the company afloat; and the impact of the outage on suppliers and the wider economy totalled £1.9 billion.
That makes the incident, according to the Cyber Monitoring Centre, the “most economically damaging” hack to have hit Britain – yet.
After all – in a year that saw serious attacks hit M&S, Co-op and even the Foreign Office – the National Cyber Security Centre revealed there had been four major security incidents every single week in the UK, so there’s plenty of opportunity to top JLR’s ignominious claim to fame.
Intel stumbled on AI, leaving Nvidia to take the lead – we’ll get to that in a moment. In summer 2024, the company slashed 15,000 jobs, some 15% of its job force, as part of plans to cut costs by $10bn.
But with new CEO Lip-Bu Tan taking the reins in March, and an $8.9 billion investment by the US government in August, perhaps change was coming. Not so much: Tan revealed plans to cut headcount by more than 20,000 to 75,000 by the end of the year, a reduction of 22% from the year before when it had already recently slashed job numbers.
There were plenty of other major layoff plans – Amazon shed 14,000 roles, Microsoft lost about 9,000 – and overall across the industry Layoffs.fyi reports 122,549 tech employees lost work this year. That’s actually slightly less than last year, if that makes you feel better.
In 2018, Apple became the first company with a trillion-dollar valuation – assuming you ignore PetroChina, which did so very briefly in 2007 – and other tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet have since joined the club.
Good for them, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang must have thought. How nice. But in 2023, Nvidia briefly topped $1 trillion too – and two years on, became the world’s most valuable company by first becoming the first company to top a $4trn valuation before stomping its own record at $5trn a few months later.
Huang noted a few weeks later that Nvidia had booked $500bn in orders covering the rest of 2025 and 2026, so at least someone’s looking forward to next year.
