Worldwide IT spending is set to hit $6.37 trillion in 2026, a 14.2% jump from last year, as the race to build AI compute capacity reshapes the global technology economy, according to Gartner’s latest forecast. The engine behind that surge is artificial intelligence. John David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, calls the buildout of AI compute capacity the biggest infrastructure undertaking in human history, a scale of investment driven by hyperscalers and enterprises racing to expand next generation data centre capacity to keep pace with AI workloads and high performance computing demand.
While every major IT category is growing in 2026, one segment is growing explosively. Data centre systems spending is forecast to jump from $506 billion in 2025 to $822 billion in 2026, a 62.5% increase, by far the steepest growth rate of any category Gartner tracks. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is right behind it, expected to grow 29.3% to reach $287 billion, as organizations lean further into cloud platforms to support AI ready applications.
Here is how Gartner breaks down the full picture for 2026, compared with 2025:
- Data Centre Systems went from $506 billion in 2025 to $822 billion in 2026, growth of 62.5%.
- Devices went from $790 billion in 2025 to $868 billion in 2026, growth of 9.8%.
- Software went from $1,271 billion in 2025 to $1,468 billion in 2026, growth of 15.5%.
- Services went from $1,492 billion in 2025 to $1,570 billion in 2026, growth of 5.3%.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) went from $222 billion in 2025 to $287 billion in 2026, growth of 29.3%.
- Communications Services went from $1,296 billion in 2025 to $1,354 billion in 2026, growth of 4.4%.
- Overall IT spending went from $5,577 billion in 2025 to $6,369 billion in 2026, growth of 14.2%.
- Source: Gartner, July 2026.
Software and services are also posting solid double digit and mid single digit gains respectively, but it’s clear where the real momentum is: everything touching AI infrastructure.
Not Every Boat Is Rising
Despite the eye catching headline figure, Gartner is careful to note this isn’t a uniform windfall across the tech sector. Lovelock points out that technology budgets are being squeezed at the same time they’re expanding. Inflation, hardware and memory supply shortages, the sheer cost of AI funding initiatives, and shifting corporate priorities are all putting pressure on IT departments even as overall spending climbs.
In other words, the growth is real, but it’s concentrated. Organizations are pouring money into AI optimized servers, cloud capacity, and AI ready software, while more traditional hardware markets continue adjusting to ongoing semiconductor and memory constraints. For many enterprises, that means tighter trade offs elsewhere in the budget to fund the AI buildout.
Gartner’s upward revision of its 2026 numbers signals growing confidence that AI adoption is not slowing down. If anything, the incremental spending growth is increasingly concentrated in the segments that directly benefit from it. That’s a meaningful signal for the robotics and automation industry too, since the same data centre capacity, high performance computing, and AI ready cloud infrastructure being built out at hyperscale are the foundational layers that power everything from large language models to the perception and decision making systems running in modern robots.
