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This is turning into a “dog bites man” story, but the forecasts for spending in the datacenter for this year keep going up and up, and a few days ago Gartner’s economists and prognosticators finished up their tea and looked at the leaves at the bottom of a cup through a polished crystal ball and predicted that datacenter spending this year would go up.
This comes as no surprise with Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Oracle all saying in the past two weeks that they would collectively be increasing their capital expenditures this year by an average of 80 percent to $705 billion, injecting $230 billion more spending into this year. About 90 percent of that combined capex is for datacenter gear, and the lion’s share of that is for AI gear, so the wonder is why IDC’s forecast for spending on datacenter systems in 2026 was only revised upwards by 10.9 percent and representing $71 billion in spending.
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Apparently Gartner was already anticipating some of this increase in spending.
Now, says the market researcher, spending in the datacenter will tally up to $653.4 billion in 2026, an increase of 31.7 percent following a 48.9 percent bump in datacenter gear spending in 2025, to $496.2 billion. It could turn out that Gartner makes another upwards revision for 2026 when its next forecast comes out in April.
For now, all the other parts of the IT sector as defined by Gartner have more or less the same forecast that the company put together back in October 2025. Spending on client devices – smartphones, PC, and laptops – has held steady, at $836.4 billion, and so has spending on enterprise software, at $1.43 trillion. Growth in IT services spending is down a fraction of a point compared to the October 2025 prediction, rising 8.7 percent to $1.87 trillion. Telecom services spending is nearly identical in the current forecast, up 4.7 percent to $1.37 trillion.
As you know, we like to take a longest view we can on datasets, so here is the Gartner IT spending forecasts between now and all the way back to 2014:
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We like to track core IT spending – datacenter systems, enterprise software, and IT services – separately from spending on devices and telecom services because this gives a better sense of the external spending by organizations on stuff they get from third parties.
Important note: To our knowledge, no one has ever tried to pair internal IT spending on systems support and system and application software development with external IT spending data from Gartner or IDC, but with maybe 50 million people worldwide involved in datacenter computing in some fashion, this would easily add up to $4 trillion dollars or more annually at prevailing compensation rates for such employees worldwide.
Gartner now says that the spending on core IT in 2025 was $3.46 trillion, up 13 percent from 2024, which tells you how sluggish software and services are growing during the GenAI boom compared to systems. In 2026, Gartner is forecasting that core IT spending, as we call it, will rise by 14.2 percent to $3.95 trillion.
The core IT spending growth is many times the rate of growth of global gross domestic product from the World Bank, as you can see in the monster table we have built above.
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Whenever you have datasets that span more than a decade, particular during a period where there has been high inflation, it is wise to inflation adjust the data to see how “real” spending has changed over time. We set the pivot point on inflation adjustment in 2021, and as you can see, in 2021 dollars, the further you go back, the more the past data is inflated to 2021 dollars and the more you go into the future beyond 2021, the more it is deflated. This means that over that bakers dozen of years shown in the monster table, the spending curve is a little bit flatter than the raw data suggests.
But you can also see that while datacenter systems spending averaged around $200 billion a year, give or take until 2023, with the peak in 2018 filling in a lot of the gap on 2012 and 2013, from then onwards we are on a wildly different trajectory, even with inflation adjustment, with datacenter systems spending going up at around a 45 degree angle, adding an average of $160 billion a year to datacenter systems spending in both 2025 and 2026, if the forecasts play out. Each incremental spend in datacenter stuff is a little less than what was spent each in 2012 and 2013 after adjusting for inflation.
Each successive year adds a new 2012 yearlet to the prior year at this rate. And the rate could very well accelerate in 2027 and beyond until we get to the end of the decade.
