It’s fitting that 2025 delivers what is probably one last headline-grabbing artificial intelligence deal, and Meta’s acquisition of AI start-up Manus—reportedly worth more than $2 billion—made it just under the wire.
The deal says a lot about this year’s AI trends and what lies ahead for 2026.
Manus made a splash in March by debuting an impressive agent that stoked fears the U.S. was falling behind China, where the start-up was founded. But the U.S. chokehold on advanced chips saw Manus relocate to
Singapore, and months later the company is selling itself to Meta for a low price relative to this year’s other blockbuster deals, such as Meta’s own $14 billion investment for just 49% of Scale AI.
Chalk that up as another American win in the AI arms race with China, but U.S. supremacy is not a foregone conclusion. China’s chatbots are impressive and the country arguably leads in energy and infrastructure capacity.
The Manus acquisition is also a departure for Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant, which focused on using AI to boost its own applications, but may now look to rival the likes of OpenAI with business-facing agents. It tees up Meta for one of the biggest trends into 2026:
enterprises actually using AI productively to boost earnings.
But continued consolidation in AI also underscores the nagging risks of a bubble focused on the biggest names in the stock market.
The prospect of the AI sector diversifying beyond a few megacap tech stocks—and therefore lowering the risks of a collapsing bubble—dims each time a smaller competitor gets swallowed or sidelined by a huge rival. Agreements such as Meta’s Manus acquisition, or Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing agreement with chip start-up Groq, create concentrated risks.
For investors, the deal spree is a promise that AI will remain dominant in 2026. In all likelihood, that should help the biggest tech stocks continue to pull the whole S&P 500 higher—at least for now.
—Jack Denton
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The Dogs of the Dow Have Their Best Year Since 2019
This was a good year to be a Dog of the Dow—especially for dividend investors.
The 10 highest-yielding stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are notching their best year on an equal-weighted basis since 2019.
- The stocks are up an average of 17.8% through Dec. 26, beating the Dow 30’s 14.5% gain. Healthcare giants Amgen and Johnson & Johnson and tech leaders IBM and Cisco each gained 28% to 44% this year.
- Dividend-paying stocks, particularly ones with above-average yields, could keep outperforming in 2026, especially if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates again. Long-term bond yields have tumbled from a high of 4.8% for the 10-year Treasury in January to 4.1% now.
- The Dow dogs will probably change in the year ahead. Based on current dividend yields, IBM, Cisco, and McDonald’s would be out. Their replacements would be a trio of underperformers this year: Nike, UnitedHealth, and Home Depot.
- Of the seven remaining stocks, Verizon and Chevron pay the biggest yields—6.7% and 4.6%, respectively. Verizon in particular looks attractive because it’s relatively cheap, too, trading at just 8.5 times 2026 earnings estimates.
What’s Next: Investors can take comfort that the dogs pay reliable—and
often very large—dividends, which should help provide steady income if bond yields head lower next year. That mix of proven income and potential rebound plays should keep the Dogs competitive in 2026.
—Paul R. La Monica and Janet H. Cho
More Companies Are Expected to Use AI in 2026
Corporations are relying more on artificial intelligence to do business, a trend that Barron’s Tae Kim predicts will just keep growing in the new year. Much of the evidence is anecdotal—but strong. AI, the tech columnist writes, will translate to big productivity gains for customer service, sales, and marketing.
- Micron Technology, for example, reports that more than 80% of its employees use AI tools, up tenfold from a year ago. The workers reported 30% productivity gains for software development and said integrating AI into the chip yield-management process has halved the time to identify problems.
- Cursor, an AI start-up, is getting more demand for its programming assistant, which allows programmers to autocomplete code, fix bugs faster, and automate boilerplate tasks. More than 60% of the Fortune 500 are now customers, CEO Michael Truell said.
- OpenAI has found that
AI is creating “significant” economic value through large gains in productivity, writes chief economist Ronnie Chatterji. More than a million businesses use OpenAI’s AI tools, he said, and weekly message volume sent to ChatGPT Enterprise over the past year has risen nearly eightfold.
- Nvidia most certainly doesn’t need convincing about the power of AI—or its pervasiveness. On Monday, the chip maker completed its
