From TheNextPlatform, October 27:
Back in early September, the prognosticators at IDC put out an ebullient but simple AI spending forecast going out to 2029, and Gartner followed suit with a much more detailed AI spending forecast, which we augmented and expanded with the help of the market researcher a few weeks later. Now, Gartner has circled back and revised its overall IT spending forecast given the explosive spending on GenAI hardware for the model builders and their partners.
This bigtime spending, says Gartner, is finally spurring investments by enterprises, particularly for AI-infused software that is more expensive than prior generations of code that did not have it. People are definitely paying for copilots and code assistants and other AI functions in their ERP, SCM, CRM, and other suites. And that, as well as the humongous datacenter system spending by the AI model builders and their cloud partners, is driving IT spending to new heights, with the expectation for overall global IT spending, as reckoned in US dollars, rising above $6 trillion for the first time in 2026.
That IT spending level is about a year ahead of schedule, based on a Gartner forecast that came out only in July. And based on past statements by Gartner, the datacenter systems spending levels that are now expected in 2026 are higher than the forecast that was made for 2028 earlier this year.
This GenAI boom has gone from chemical to nuclear fission, and perhaps there will be nuclear fusion at some point to really blow the forecasts to kingdom come.
Here is the October 22 forecast for spending for 2025 and 2026 by the usual categories of datacenter systems, enterprise software, IT services, devices, and telecom services:
We have kept the old category names in some cases because they are better.
In looking at that table above, to paraphrase the great Paul Hogan: That’s not a table – this is a table:
....MUCH MORE
