All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2025".
For the 2024 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.
You can find all the markets under the tag [2025 Forbes AI predictions].
Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2025's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.
I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.
Description of this prediction from the article:
In 2023, the critical physical resource that bottlenecked AI growth was GPU chips. In 2024, it has become power and data centers.
Few storylines have gotten more play in 2024 than AI’s enormous and fast-growing energy needs amid the rush to build more AI data centers. After remaining flat for decades, global power demand from data centers is projected to double between 2023 and 2026 thanks to the AI boom. In the U.S., data centers are projected to consume close to 10% of all power by 2030, up from just 3% in 2022.
The demand for energy to power AI data centers is skyrocketing. Our energy systems are not prepared.
Image source: Semianalysis
Today’s energy system is simply not equipped to handle the tremendous surge in demand coming from artificial intelligence workloads. A historic collision between these two multi-trillion-dollar systems—our energy grid and our computing infrastructure—is looming.
Nuclear power has gained momentum this year as a possible solution to this Gordian knot. Nuclear represents an ideal energy source for AI in many ways: it is zero-carbon, available 24/7 and effectively inexhaustible. But realistically, new nuclear energy sources won’t be able to make a dent in this problem until the 2030s, given long research, project development and regulatory timelines. This goes for traditional nuclear fission power plants, for next-generation “small modular reactors” (SMRs) and certainly for nuclear fusion power plants.
Next year, an unconventional new idea to tackle this challenge will emerge and attract real resources: putting AI data centers in space.
AI data centers in space—at first blush, this sounds like a bad joke about a VC trying to combine too many startup buzzwords. But there may in fact be something here.
The biggest bottleneck to rapidly building more data centers on Earth is accessing the requisite power. A computing cluster in orbit can enjoy free, limitless, zero-carbon power around the clock: the sun is always shining in space.
Of course, plenty of practical challenges remain to be solved. One obvious issue is whether and how large volumes of data can be moved cost-efficiently between orbit and Earth. This is an open question, but it may prove solvable, with promising work underway using lasers and other high-bandwidth optical communications technology.
A buzzy startup out of Y Combinator named Lumen Orbit recently raised $11 million to pursue this exact vision: building a multi-gigawatt network of data centers in space to train AI models.
As Lumen CEO Philip Johnston put it: “Instead of paying $140 million for electricity, you can pay $10 million for a launch and solar.”
Lumen will not be the only organization taking this concept seriously in 2025.
Other startup competitors will emerge. Don’t be surprised to see one or more of the cloud hyperscalers launch exploratory efforts along these lines as well. Amazon already has extensive experience putting assets into orbit via Project Kuiper; Google has a long history of funding moonshot ideas like this; even Microsoft is no stranger to the space economy. Elon Musk’s SpaceX could conceivably make a play here, too.
Update 2025-11-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Partial resolution framework:
If Rob Toews uses language like "Right-ish" or "Wrong-ish", the market will resolve to 75% PROB or 25% PROB respectively
Similar language ("mostly right", "nearly there", "in the right direction", or negative equivalents) will be treated the same way
If the resolution is ambiguous ("hard to say", "some right, some wrong", or other 50% answers), the market will resolve to N/A
Update 2025-11-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): In cases where resolution is ambiguous or not clean cut, the creator may outsource resolution to Manifold moderators rather than resolving themselves.
Update 2025-12-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The resolution article from Forbes/Rob Toews is expected around December 8, 2025 (based on timing from previous years).
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@Jcd51
Please note the difference between your "development starts" and Rob Toew's "startup emerge" and "exploratory efforts launched". In uncertain domains we may see years of exploratory efforts in speculative bets before the development of the final solutions chosen start.
I still don't understand how this makes sense. It's only nighttime for half the day, so you only need half as much solar panel area in space as you do on Earth for the same power requirements. (Ok a little less due to clouds and angle, but not that much less.) Surely launching and maintaining a solar array in space is more than twice as expensive as just putting it in Nevada or whatever.
@IsaacKing as I understand the energy claim in two sentences:
if you want to scale <10x, the current usage: Earth is the safest, cheapest, and safest choice
if you wnat to sacel 1.000x, space is the only chance
If you expect to capitalize a (eventual) future exponential growth, you want to be the first having this technology
@IsaacKing a lot of solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, especially clouds and in locations where the sun is at a low inclination. In high orbits you just get 100% of the sun all the time
@IsaacKing also once it's in space there isn't really any maintenance. There's no dust. It's pretty much fire and forget unless you're doing something particularly sophisticated.
Musk: “AI in space would exceed the entire US economy just in intelligence processing every 2 years.”
@MiguelLM December 8 last year, similar to 2023 IIRC.
@HenriThunberg great, thanks!
I always find much harder to decide when to sell than when to buy. But with this timing it is too late for a limit order.
@HenriThunberg @SisyphosDale want to do a larger bet? I don't want to get sniped on the news so I removed my limit orders, but am happy to arrange something.
@MiguelLM well. Not -me- personally, but someone else did. I just designed/run the compute.
Should be news about it by the end of the year.
@meawoppl if this ends up being true (a different >40 Mi$ effort is published by the press before year end) then the chances that Forbes will evaluate the prediction as “Right” are even higher than what we assume today
I don't think it has happened in the last series of predictions (2023 and 2024 versions linked above), but since this market is getting bigger I think it's good if we can agree on expectations for partial resolutions. The below (slightly modified) was what we agreed upon for another market, does anyone have issue with that?
In 2023 resolutions, he used "Right-ish" to grade some of his predictions. In cases of a similar "Right-ish" (or "Wrong-ish") answer this year, I will resolve to 75% PROB or 25% PROB, respectively. This will apply for similar language too ("mostly right", "nearly there", "in the right direction", and vice versa negatively framed). If he says something like "hard to say" or "some right, some wrong", or anything else that feels like a cop-out or 50% answer, I will just call that N/A.
@HenriThunberg FWIW I'm also happy to outsource resolution to mods in such less than clean cut resolution cases.
@Magnify I also have 10% of my mana in YES shares for this market
But my total mana is 20K, not 303K 😂
It seems to me that we have:
4 pages of people discussing whether AI datacenters in space make sense, and
2 or 3 traders guessing whether Forbes will publicly evaluate their forecast as Wrong, in a topic with quite subjective resolution criteria and several public announcements confirming their forecast
@HenriThunberg I think your reward could be buying at 25% instead of 50+. I know I’d put down no there
@MiguelLM eh Forbes writes themselves as incorrect plenty. I don’t think they would say this is a true prediction at this point unless something sensational happened.
The element of ambiguity via Forbes in my estimate pushes this from a 5% value to maybe 15%.
I think I have roughly 20% of my mana in NO, I’m pretty new my net is 7K
@Magnify I would say Forbes wrote:
several paragraphs of introduction, to give context
three sentences of forecast
a couple of ideas of who could make the forecast become Right
their forecast, in my opinion, is
Lumen will not be the only organization taking this concept seriously in 2025.
Other startup competitors will emerge. Don’t be surprised to see one or more of the cloud hyperscalers launch exploratory efforts along these lines as well.
some ideas of who could make the forecast Rigth are
Amazon already has extensive experience putting assets into orbit via Project Kuiper; Google has a long history of funding moonshot ideas like this; even Microsoft is no stranger to the space economy. Elon Musk’s SpaceX could conceivably make a play here, too.
What we ended up having in 2025 was:
second round of investment for Lumen (now called StarCloud), with successful satellite launch
tomorrow.io launched and announced by Forbes as An AI Space Company Is Born
Project Suncatcher launched by Google, and announced by CEO
These facts should meet the threshold for both:
"Other startup competitors will emerge", and
"one or more of the cloud hyperscalers launch exploratory efforts"
I would say we are more in the 60-75% range than in 5-15%.
@Magnify if you search for AI in space articles published by Forbes in 2025, all of them seem to be more bullyish than bearish.
If we expect some consistency, we should be surprised with a year of confirmatory headlines resulting in a Wrong outcome.
This is the first time I bet on Forbes forecasts, and I haven't read in detail previous years' evaluations, so take my words with a big graint of salt.
@MiguelLM a lot of these don’t count as data centres though. Tomorrow.io for example is data collection for earth based data centres. Project suncatcher does seem like it could lead to one, but reading the google article they have on it is more like “we will collect energy in space …. AI!!”. That is to say their actual goal is practical R&D and all ai mentions are to hype investors, but I can see how Forbes would jump on the hype train like that.
I did some glancing at previous predictions and they seem willing to call themselves wrong even when there’s a bit of ambiguity here and there, but the landscape is changing I will grant.
@Magnify valid points, thanks for pointing them out.
They would help me update my odds to 40-60%
I still don't see the 5-15%. 1 out of 20, 1 out of 6 ... they should come with stronger evidence in my view.
@Magnify
on your assumption
Project suncatcher does seem like it could lead to one, but reading the google article they have on it is more like “we will collect energy in space …. AI!!”
This is how I understand their article:
headline: "Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design"
sub-headline: "Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space."
in the article they review several challenges to make it happen, such as how to send data, whether the hardware will resist, etc.
for sure the energy is a big piece, because the main argument of moving to space is the supposed energy benefits, so it has to be the central part of the evaluation
I'm talking about this blog post: Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design
@HenriThunberg
> @Magnify haha yeah there should be some badge/reward for when the odds are so lopsided.
Call it the Krantz Award.