ARK's Big Ideas 2025: Unlocking Exponential Growth
ARK's Big Ideas 2025: Unlocking Exponential Growth
- AI agents are projected to revolutionize consumer interactions and business workflows, offering personalized assistance and automating tasks.
- Advancements in AI, energy storage, and public blockchains are identified as key drivers accelerating technological progress and economic growth.
- Multiomic technologies are set to transform disease diagnostics and drug discovery by providing unprecedented access to biological data.
- The report forecasts significant growth and transformations in areas like robotaxis, satellite connectivity, and digital financial services, driven by ongoing technological advancements.
- Despite significant advancements and potential, the report acknowledges the risks and uncertainties associated with investing in disruptive innovation.
ARK's Big Ideas 2025: Unlocking Exponential Growth
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BIG IDEAS 2025
- Ã Aim for a cross-sector understanding of technology and combine top-down and bottom-up research.
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Risks Of Investing In Innovation
Please note: Companies that ARK believes are capitalizing on disruptive innovation and developing technologies to displace older technologies or create new markets may not in fact do so. ARK aims to educate investors and seeks to size the potential investment opportunity, noting that risks and uncertainties may impact our projections and research models. Investors should use the content presented for informational purposes only, and be aware of market risk, disruptive innovation risk, regulatory risk, and risks related to certain innovation areas.
Please read risk disclosure carefully.
Table Of Contents
BIG IDEAS 2025
Unlocking Exponential Growth Through Disruptive Innovation
As we stand on the cusp of a new era of unprecedented growth, ARK Invest's 'Big Ideas 2025' illuminates the complex convergences between and among the five technologically enabled innovation platforms evolving today: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Energy Storage, Public Blockchains, and Multiomic Sequencing. These platforms should drive exponential advances across industries and catalyze a step change in global economic growth.
Presented in this year's report are 11 Big Ideas illustrating the massive transformations occurring today. Our research suggests that these Big Ideas are poised to boost productivity dramatically, to revolutionize industries, and to create long-term investment opportunities.
Join our journey into the future of innovation and its profound implications for investors, businesses, and society at large.
Welcome to ARK's Big Ideas 2025.
The Second Half Of The Chessboard
Convergence Among Technology Platforms Leading To Significant Acceleration In Macroeconomic Growth
Brett Winton
CHIEF FUTURIST
Five Innovation Platforms Are Catalyzing Accelerated Growth
Public Blockchains
Multiomics
Upon large-scale adoption, all money and contracts will likely migrate onto Public Blockchains that enable and verify digital scarcity and proof of ownership. The financial ecosystem is likely to reconfigure to accommodate the rise of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts . These technologies increase transparency, reduce the influence of capital and regulatory controls, and collapse the costs of contract execution. In such a world, Digital Wallets will become increasingly necessary as more assets become money-like and corporations and consumers adapt to the new financial infrastructure. Corporate structures may be called into question.
Computational systems and software that evolve with data can solve intractable problems, automate knowledge work, and accelerate technology's integration into every economic sector. The adoption of Neural Networks should prove more momentous than electrification and potentially create tens of trillion dollars of value. At scale, these systems will require unprecedented computational resources, and AI-specific compute hardware should dominate the Next Gen Cloud datacenters that train and operate AI models. The potential for end-users is clear: a constellation of AI-driven Intelligent Devices that permeate people's lives, changing the way that they spend, work, and play. The adoption of artificial intelligence should transform every sector, impact every business, and catalyze every innovation platform.
Energy Storage
The declining costs of Advanced Battery Technology should cause an explosion in form factors, enabling Autonomous Mobility systems that collapse the cost of transportation. Electric drivetrain cost declines should unlock micro-mobility and aerial systems, including flying taxis, enabling business models that transform cities. Autonomy should reduce the cost of taxi, delivery, and surveillance by an order of magnitude, enabling frictionless transport that will increase the velocity of ecommerce and make individual car ownership the exception rather than the rule. These innovations combined with large-scale stationary batteries and Distributed Energy Generation , notably solar and small-scale fission, should cause a transformation in energy, substituting electricity for liquid fuel and increasing system-wide resilience, reliability, and production.
The cost to gather, sequence, and understand digital biological data is falling precipitously. Multiomic Technologies provide research scientists, therapeutic organizations, and health platforms with unprecedented access to DNA, RNA, protein, and digital health data. Cancer care should transform with pan-cancer blood tests. Fed by rich multiomic data and powered by Programmable Biology , AI systems running autonomous labs could collapse the cost of drug discovery, development, and trial, transforming returns in a sector that has stagnated. Biological discoveries should power novel Precision Therapies that target and cure rare diseases and chronic conditions, unlocking profound economics. Over time, the design and synthesis of novel biological constructs will yield advances in agriculture, material science, and even computation.
Robotics
Catalyzed by artificial intelligence, Humanoid Robots should operate alongside humans and navigate legacy infrastructure, changing the way products are made and sold, and eventually the way we live our lives at home. 3D Printing should contribute to the digitization of manufacturing, increasing not only the performance and precision of end-use parts, but also the resilience of supply chains. Meanwhile, the world's fastest robots, Reusable Rockets , should continue to reduce the cost of launching satellite constellations and enable uninterruptible connectivity and earth observation. A nascent innovation platform, robotics could collapse the cost of transporting across distance, with hypersonic travel, the cost of manufacturing complexity with 3D printers, and the cost of physical work with AI-guided robots.
In Compounding, The Real Action Takes Place On The Second Half Of The Chessboard
Legendarily requesting his reward for inventing chess, the 6 th century advisor to the Indian ruler:
I don't require much, your highness, just a grain of wheat on the first square of the board, doubling consecutively on each square thereafter.
By lore, when he agreed to the reward, the Indian ruler thought it quite reasonable. By the 6 th row of the chessboard, however, he had exhausted India's treasury, having paid just ~.001% of the bill.
Today, computational advance has completed the equivalent of the 6 th row on the chessboard. Entering the AI cycle in 2018, computers had crossed 40 performance doublings and in 2023 surpassed 48. By the end of this decade, thanks to the acceleration in AI, computation could reach the end of the chessboard.
AI Is Accelerating The Performance Doubling Rate, Closing In On The End Of The Chessboard
Enabled primarily by architectural improvements in AI systems, performance per dollar of AI compute is expected to improve >1000x by 2030. At that time, we expect that compute performance will have doubled 64 times since the advent of the integrated circuit.
Note: The 'Compute Capability per $2024 Dollar' displayed on the Y axis above is a single metric that measures 1000s of computations per second purchasable for $1. For AI compute performance, computational impact is adjusted upwards by the rate of AI architectural performance per dollar improvements according to ARK's research. It's a very large number, so we use scientific notation, e.g., "1E+21," meaning 1 followed by 21 zeros. Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2025. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources, including Kurzweil 2005 and Jurvetson 2024 as of December 31, 2024, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Forecasts are inherently limited and cannot be relied upon.
AI Advances Should Unlock Massive Market Opportunities
As AI continues to accelerate, robotaxis should proliferate, drug development timelines and costs should collapse, and AI agents should solve software engineering challenges autonomously, monitoring and modifying systems around the clock.
*Estimates. Note: 'FSD': Full Self-Driving. SWE-bench is a dataset that tests systems' ability to solve GitHub issues automatically. The dataset collects 2,294 Issue-Pull Request pairs from 12 popular Python repositories. Evaluation is performed by unit test verification using post-PR behavior as the reference solution. See Jiminez et al. 2024. Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2025. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources, including Tesla, Recursion, and SWEbench.com, and OpenAI as of December 31, 2024, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Forecasts are inherently limited and cannot be relied upon.
Convergence Is Accelerating The Technology Revolution
ARK measures the degree to which technologies serve as catalysts between and among innovation platforms. The convergences among them are increasing, with network density up 30% in the past year.
AI is proving more critical to unlocking the value of Precision Therapies and Multiomic Technologies Smart Contract . ecosystems are serving as test beds in which autonomous AI agents can be renumerated for sharpening their capabilities. Next Gen Cloud energy demand is pulling forward timelines for Distributed Energy Generation .
Note: 'Network density' measures the degree of interconnectedness between nodes relative to the maximum potential interconnectedness. In our research, if every technology were expected to catalyze another technology to increase in value by an order of magnitude or more, that would equate to a fully interconnected network. Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2025. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources as of December 31, 2024, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Forecasts are inherently limited and cannot be relied upon.
Potential
The Acceleration In Neural Networks Is Accelerating Every Other Disruptive Technology
Technology
Catalyzing Technology
Advances In AI, Energy Storage, And Public Blockchains Are Critical To The Pace Of Technological Advance
Technology Importance As A Catalyst
Among disruptive technologies, Neural Networks are the most important catalyst.
According to our research, advances in neural networks will increase the value of six of the other 14 technologies by at least an order of magnitude, creating massive market expansions for Next Gen Cloud Intelligent Devices Autonomous Mobility , , , Humanoid Robots Precision Medicine , , and Multiomic Technology .
The AI-led revolution in technology is likely to lead to dramatic productivity gains and a stepfunction increase in economic growth.
Technology
Platform
AI
Energy
Storage
Multiomics
Robotics
Public
Blockchains
SCALE
Advances another technology by 1 order of magnitude
Technology Inflection Should Lead To GDP Inflection
Structural changes in the underlying rate of macroeconomic growth are the historical rule, not the exception.
After 100,000 years of economic stagnation leading to year 1, innovations, notably writing, allowed empires to stitch together continents, which quadrupled real growth through 1000 AD.
Agricultural innovations enabled denser populations and labor specialization, leading to a doubling of growth through 1500 to 0.3% per annum.
During the 400 years through 1900, annual GDP growth doubled again to 0.6% as the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution swept the globe.
The Second Industrial Revolution-marked by electrification, the automobile, and telephony-ushered in the modern age and quintupled growth to 3% on average over the last 125 years.
Technological breakthroughs in AI Autonomous Mobility , , and Humanoid Robots are likely to turbocharge productivity again, causing another step function in growth over the next 5 to 10 years.
Disruptive Innovation Could Grow To Dominate Markets
Disruptive innovation could command more than two-thirds of the global equity market, compounding at a 38% rate through 2030.
Within innovation, market value could broaden out beyond the so-called Mag 6.
Non-innovation businesses could begin to shrink as technological deflation associated with innovation threatens margins and competitiveness, even amid rapid macroeconomic growth.
AI Agents
Redefining Consumer Interactions And Business Workflows
Nicholas Grous ASSOCIATE PORTFOLIO MANAGER
Varshika Prasanna
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, NEXT GENERATION INTERNET
Frank Downing
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, NEXT GENERATION INTERNET
Jozef Soja
RESEARCH ANALYST, NEXT GENERATION INTERNET
What Are AI Agents?
AI agents are poised to accelerate the adoption of digital applications and create an epochal shift in human-computer interaction.
AI Agents:
Understand intent through natural language
Plan using reasoning and appropriate context
Take action using tools to accomplish the intent
Improve through iteration and continuous learning
Usefulness
