The true behemoth of the future AI era was most likely only registered as a company this year.

This isn’t alarmism; it’s the norm of technological revolutions. Looking back at the internet wave, Google was founded in 1998 and Facebook in 2004. Neither was an early first-wave player, yet they ultimately defined the era. The AI revolution follows the same pattern—the road is paved with the bodies of early pioneers, and the real winners often enter only after the technological inflection point.

2025 is being called the "first year of AI applications." The capabilities of large models are becoming mature, but the path to commercialization is still shrouded in fog. What does that mean? It means the infrastructure is already in place, the stage lights are on, but the lead actor hasn’t appeared yet. Companies founded in 2026 happen to land on this most delicate timing: they don’t have to bear the astronomical cost of early model training, they don’t need to exhaust their ammunition in the compute arms race, and instead can stand on the shoulders of giants, using mature foundation models to tackle the real pain points.

More importantly, real disruption has never been about a “better search engine” or a “faster chatbot.” In the PC era, the greatest companies weren’t the hardware makers—they were the ones building operating systems, like Microsoft. In the mobile internet era, the winner wasn’t a feature-phone giant, but Apple, which redefined the phone. In the AI era, the megacompany likely won’t be one of today’s familiar big names. It may be a company we haven’t heard of yet—silently taking root somewhere in a garage, in a university lab, or on a departing engineer’s laptop.

Why specifically 2026? Because the technical paradigm is shifting. From 2023 to 2025, the industry focus is on “how big the model is.” Starting in 2026, the focus will shift to “what the model can do.” When the base capabilities become homogeneous, the winning factors move from technical parameters to product insight, scenario entry, and business-model innovation. New companies entering at this time have no historical baggage, no path dependence—they can use the purest AI-native way of thinking to rebuild the industry.

Think about it: if AI can truly become a general-purpose foundation infrastructure like electricity, the biggest opportunity won’t be “building power plants,” but “using power plants.” In the future, the giant megacompany could be one that uses AI to completely reshape medical diagnostic workflows, a company that reconfigures supply-chain decision-making, one that makes education truly personalized, or even one that creates entirely new interaction paradigms and product forms we can’t even imagine today.

Of course, most companies founded in 2026 will die. But just one that catches the “right timing, right scenario, right people” will be enough to reshape an era.

History never favors the early movers; it only rewards the breakthrough-makers. 2026 may be the next year for breakthroughs.