At the beginning of 2025, SambaNova published nine predictions about the future of AI — from power constraints and the rise of inference, to the shift toward open models and sovereign infrastructure.
A year later, those shifts are not only underway, they're accelerating. Inference now drives real-world cost. Power, not compute, is the new bottleneck. And control – not just capability — is shaping AI infrastructure decisions.
Here’s what happened in 2025, what we got right, and insights for 2026.
1. Inference Moved to Center Stage
2025 was the year enterprise AI became a deployment problem. Inference — not training — absorbed the majority of cost and complexity. Every prompt, every decision, every customer-facing task is an inference workload. And at scale, inference runs continuously — not just in large training bursts.
