Gartner: IT spending surge
- Gartner forecasts global IT spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, driven largely by AI infrastructure investment. - The projection implies a 13.5% increase in IT spending year-over-year for 2026. - That shift favors semiconductor suppliers, cloud vendors, and infrastructure-heavy vendors while raising questions about labor and hiring sentiment (infotechlead.com) (businessnewsthisweek.com)
Gartner said on April 22 that worldwide information technology spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, up 13.5% from 2025. (gartner.com) The new forecast is higher than Gartner’s February estimate of $6.15 trillion and 10.8% growth for 2026. Gartner revised the outlook upward within 11 weeks. (gartner.com 1) (gartner.com 2) Gartner said the increase is being led by “sustained momentum” in artificial intelligence infrastructure and software. In January, the firm separately forecast worldwide AI spending at $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% year-over-year increase. (gartner.com 1) (gartner.com 2) That spending is concentrated in the machinery behind AI, not just the apps people use. Data center systems are the servers, chips, memory and storage that train and run large models, and Gartner has said AI-related infrastructure is still surging even when other new spending slows. (gartner.com 1) (gartner.com 2) The supplier side is moving with it. Gartner said on April 8 that global semiconductor revenue is projected to exceed $1.3 trillion in 2026, with 64% growth and a 125% jump in dynamic random-access memory prices as a storage crunch extends into 2027. (gartner.com) Gartner’s forecasts also point to uneven demand across the technology stack. In February, the firm said device growth would slow, and later that month it projected worldwide PC shipments would fall 10.4% and smartphone shipments 8.4% in 2026 because memory costs were rising. (gartner.com) (gartner.com) The labor picture is less direct than the hardware boom. Gartner said in December 2025 that 78% of chief human resources officers agreed workflows and roles would need to change to get the most from AI investments, and in October 2024 it predicted 20% of organizations would use AI through 2026 to flatten structures by removing more than half of current middle-management positions. (gartner.com) (gartner.com) For now, Gartner’s latest revision says the money is still flowing toward compute capacity, software and the physical systems needed to run AI at scale. The next question is whether that April 22 forecast holds as companies move from buying capacity to proving returns. (gartner.com)
