Scroll back through the last year, and the same words come up again and again.The top-trending terms of 2025, from artificial intelligence to Zohran Mamdani, shaped headlines across politics, conflict, technology and climate.As the year comes to a close, AJ Labs has compiled an A to Z list of names, places and issues that generated sustained interest throughout 2025, according to a loose analysis of our own most-viewed story tags and those that appeared in Google’s most searched.Taken together, these terms are a patchwork of issues that are also likely to spill into 2026, from ongoing conflicts to a changing technosocial landscape not seen since the dawn of the internet.This is 2025 from A to Z, by the words that made the year. Artificial IntelligenceAI adoption is rapidly growing, and some of the biggest conversations this year have been on how it will shake up the workplace and reimagine economies.In October, the Reuters Institute carried out a survey in six countries and found that the proportion of respondents who said they used a generative AI system such as ChatGPT jumped from 40 percent to 61 percent this year. As governments try to regulate the fast-growing technology, fears of job losses and echoes of a dotcom-style bust have also resounded with big AI players such as Nvidia, Google, Meta and OpenAI making monumental circular deals this year.According to UBS projections, global annual AI spending is expected to swell to $375bn by the end of the year before topping $3 trillion annually by 2030 – this includes spending on AI infrastructure, as well as power and resources for electricity demand.BitcoinBitcoin surged to new heights in 2025, driven by institutional inflows and t …
