In 2024, the McKinsey Global Institute identified 18 future arenas—industries with the highest growth rates and most competitive dynamism—where market-share changes are the norm. Since 2022, the future arenas have added about $18 trillion in market cap. To explore how competition is unfolding, these 18 future arenas have been grouped into five broad clusters. The AI foundation cluster accounts for about 60 percent of the value created—nearly $11 trillion. Digitization and electrification contributed an additional almost $5 trillion and more than $900 billion, respectively. Across all clusters, AI often acts as an accelerator by improving performance, lowering costs, and enabling technology resets, note McKinsey’s Kevin Russell, Chris Bradley, Naveen Sastry, Suhayl Chettih, Kweilin Ellingrud, and Natalya Goryunova.
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A voronoi chart showing global market-cap gains of about $18 trillion from 2022 to 2025 across 18 “future arenas of competition.” The largest contributor is the AI foundation (~$10.8 trillion), dominated by semiconductors ($7.4 trillion), cloud services ($1.8 trillion), and AI software and services ($1.6 trillion). The second-largest category is digitization (~$4.9 trillion), led by digital advertising ($3.1 trillion), followed by e-commerce ($773 billion), video games ($284 billion), cybersecurity ($363 billion), and streaming/video-related segments. Smaller contributions come from electrification (~$928 billion, including electric vehicles $786 billion, batteries $104 billion, and nuclear fission $38 billion), new bio-frontiers (~$628 billion, largely obesity drugs $614 billion and non-medical biotech), and hard tech (~$562 billion, including space $395 billion, robotics $101 billion, shared autonomous vehicles $51 billion, and smaller categories like modular construction and future air mobility). Overall, semiconductors and digital advertising together account for more than half of total market-cap gains.
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Source: McKinsey Value Intelligence; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
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