Gartner: AI lifts IT spend
- Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will top $6.31 trillion in 2026, led by AI infrastructure investment. - Data-center systems are expected to grow 55.8%, while IT services should exceed $1.87 trillion. - The composition makes spending infrastructure-heavy, suggesting advisory demand will focus on connecting AI capex to measurable business outcomes (infotechlead.com).
Gartner said on April 22 that worldwide information technology spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, with artificial intelligence infrastructure driving the increase. (gartner.com) The research firm put 2026 growth at 13.5% from 2025, up from its February forecast of $6.15 trillion and 10.8% growth. Gartner said the revision reflects faster momentum in AI infrastructure and advanced memory. (gartner.com 1) (gartner.com 2) Data center systems are the fastest-growing category in Gartner’s table, rising to $788.0 billion in 2026 from $505.6 billion in 2025. IT services remain the largest bucket by dollars at $1.87 trillion, ahead of software at $1.39 trillion. (gartner.com) (infotechlead.com) In plain terms, companies are still buying the pipes and power plants of the AI era before they buy all the finished applications. Gartner said spending is concentrating in servers, memory, and cloud-scale computing needed to run larger AI workloads. (gartner.com) That pattern fits Gartner’s separate January forecast that worldwide AI spending will total $2.52 trillion in 2026, up 44% year over year. In that forecast, Gartner said technology providers building AI foundations would add $401 billion of spending in 2026. (gartner.com) Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock said in the April 22 release that “data center investment is ramping rapidly” as AI workloads scale. He also said the current wave is being led by infrastructure and not by a broad-based surge across every technology category. (gartner.com) The mix matters for vendors and consultants because infrastructure spending usually lands first with chipmakers, server makers, cloud operators, and systems integrators. Gartner’s category breakdown shows devices growing 5.4% and communications services 2.1%, far below the 55.8% jump in data center systems. (gartner.com) The forecast also shows how quickly Gartner’s view has shifted in six months. In October 2025, Gartner said 2026 spending would exceed $6 trillion for the first time at $6.08 trillion; by February it raised that to $6.15 trillion; by April it lifted the number again to $6.31 trillion. (gartner.com 1) (gartner.com 2) (gartner.com 3) For 2026 budgets, Gartner’s latest message is less about a uniform tech boom than about where the money is landing first: data centers, high-performance compute, and the services needed to turn that hardware into working AI systems. (gartner.com)
