MW ChatGPT is so 2025 - here are the real AI gold mines for investors in 2026
By Mark Minevich
Money is flooding into AI. Defense, healthcare and agentics are the big winners, writes Mark Minevich.
2025 was the year of the chatbot. 2026 is the year of the AI agentics.
The scale of capital being deployed to AI is staggering.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a stand-alone category; it is now part of the infrastructure for companies in finance, healthcare, defense technology and enterprise software. It will be a building block and a key ingredient in every new "unicorn" - a company with a valuation of at least $1 billion.
In 2025, more than 100 new unicorn stocks were minted, bringing the total to almost 1,300. Though not all are from the same industry, the most valuable have one throughline: artificial Intelligence. Additionally, close to 90% of these companies are based in the United States. This provides multiple avenues through which to explore where capital investment is going and why.
The scale of capital being deployed to AI is staggering. In late 2025, AI startups raised $73.1 billion in a single quarter, accounting for almost 58% of all global venture capital funding. OpenAI closed a $110 billion round in February; Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30 billion each at $730 billion pre-money valuation.
That single round of funding is larger than the total U.S. venture-capital investment across all sectors in 2023. January 2026 alone produced 31 new unicorns - the highest ever monthly count since June 2022. We are seeing in Silicon Valley that capital is not just flowing to AI, but flooding it.
Chinese AI models now cost roughly one-sixth to one-fourth of comparable U.S. systems, and China's price advantage is widening.
The fact that the overwhelming percentage of unicorns reside in the United States is not an accident. When looking globally, the United States invests almost three times as much in AI as the next closest country. Overall, the U.S. Government invests $328 billion in AI. That's more than the entire E.U. invests, and far above China's $138 billion commitment.
This is an enormous lead, but not one that will discourage global competition. In fact, competition has already arrived. Chinese AI models now cost roughly one-sixth to one-fourth of comparable U.S. systems, according to Rand, and China's competitive advantage is widening.
In January 2026, two Chinese AI companies, MiniMax (HK:100) and Zhipu, went public in Hong Kong to massive investor demand. MiniMax saw its stock double on its first day of trading. Zhipu's GLM-5 model was trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips, making it the first frontier-level model built without any U.S.-restricted Nvidia (NVDA) hardware.
This is a direct challenge to the assumption that U.S. export controls will maintain America's lead, and pushes the U.S. into a price war. If these Chinese companies prove to be a successful challenger, more investors will look to fund Chinese LLM developers. These unicorns will also set a standard for future Chinese AI businesses.
Moreover, Microsoft President Brad Smith has publicly warned that U.S.-based AI companies are being outpaced by Chinese competitors in emerging markets. If Chinese firms continue to produce competitive models at a fraction of the cost, more global investors will redirect capital to China. The U.S. lead is real, but not guaranteed.
Geopolitical tensions drive investment
Autonomous systems + geopolitical tension = massive capital investment.
The current equation is simple: autonomous systems + geopolitical tension = massive capital investment. Unicorns such as Saronic ($4B), Castelion ($2.8B), Chaos ($2B) and HawkEye 360 ($2B) are part of this growing category, with even more unicorns on the horizon.
Global defense-sector spending has increased year-over-year for 10 consecutive years, reaching $2.7 trillion in 2025. Russia's invasion of Ukraine - and the ongoing war - was a major driver, as have conflicts in the Middle East, and now Central and South America.
Companies that develop tech in the areas of autonomous vehicles and drones, target identification, predictive maintenance and logistics optimization will be critical to defense and have the potential to drive ROI in capital investment.
The U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran that began on Feb. 28 and Iran's retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz have removed any remaining ambiguity about the investment direction. What the International Energy Agency has called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market has sent Brent crude (BRN00) prices soaring and disrupted 20% of global oil flows. Iranian missile and drone strikes hit energy infrastructure across Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait and Bahrain, directly threatening the physical layer of Gulf sovereign AI infrastructure, desalination plants and the data-center build-outs that underpin projects like AWS, Humain and Stargate UAE.
Gulf states have committed more than $100 billion to AI infrastructure in the past 18 months, specifically Saudi Arabia's Humain, the UAE's MGX and Stargate partnership, and Aramco Digital's expanding compute capacity, positioning themselves as sovereign AI hubs. It now sits inside a conflict zone. The same desalination plants that keep data centers cooled and cities habitable were hit by Iranian drones in Kuwait. The same airspace that carries cloud traffic was closed to commercial aviation for weeks. For investors backing AI infrastructure unicorns with Gulf sovereign capital backing them, this is a risk that is priced in.
Geopolitical conflicts are the basis upon which many industries survive and upon which the next generation of unicorns will be built.
The capital response has been immediate. Defense-tech VC doubled to $49.1 billion in 2025, with Anduril alone reportedly raising a $4 billion round at a $60 billion valuation. At The Hague summit, NATO allies committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on core defense and an additional 1.5% on security-related expenditure by 2035, effectively tripling pre-2022 European spending levels. The E.U. launched an EUR800 billion rearmament plan. The Trump administration proposed a record $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. And the World Economic Forum named geoeconomic confrontation the top global risk. If it wasn't clear before, it should be now. Geopolitical conflicts are the basis upon which many industries survive and upon which the next generation of unicorns will be built.
Health AI is a sleeping giant
In 2025, $18 billion was invested in AI in the healthcare sector. This will continue to grow as healthcare technology advances and as more AI-driven robotics companies enter the industry.
When investing massive capital, healthcare is as safe a bet as you can make. It's heavily regulated, has a massive amount of total addressable markets (TAM) - and as the population grows, so does the customer base. This long-term investment potential will push the creation of more unicorns as they will be protected from competition and capable of immense, sustained growth.
Additionally, high-valuation companies such as Abridge (clinical documentation), Hippocratic AI (safe LLM agents), OpenEvidence (medical research) and Tempus AI (data-driven diagnostics) are building AI solutions to reduce clinician burnout, speed up drug discovery, and personalize patient treatment.
Agentic AI is the next unicorn factory
The next wave of unicorns will not just build AI models, but autonomous systems that replace entire workflows.
If 2025 was the year of the chatbot, 2026 is the year of the AI agentics. Agentic AI systems autonomously plan, reason and execute complex workflows. This is now the dominant investment theme in enterprise technology. Gartner projects that 40%% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The global AI-agent market is projected to grow to $236 billion by 2034 from $7.9 billion in 2025.
Companies across customer service, software development, financial services and logistics are deploying agents to complete work without human intervention. The next wave of unicorns will not just build AI models, but autonomous systems that replace entire workflows. For investors, this is where the infrastructure thesis becomes an opportunity. Companies that can orchestrate, govern and scale these agents across the enterprise will be the next category winners.
What to watch for
The pattern emerging from the 2025 unicorn class suggests a clear investment framework - following this path will mitigate risk and provide greater potential for return on investment:
First, find where there is massive government and private-sector AI funding.
Second, find companies and founders using AI in sectors with sustainable growth potential and a history of stability.
Third, narrow that down to which of those companies have an understanding of and willingness to leverage agentic AI wherever possible.
A company with these three components should be at the top of any investor's list.
Mark Minevich is a globally recognized chief AI officer, AI strategist and investor. He is founding partner and chairman of Going Global Ventures (GGV), a New York-based investment, technology, and strategic advisory firm.
-Mark Minevich
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 25, 2026 13:41 ET (17:41 GMT)
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