Demand for CPU and GPU compute as well as main memory and flash memory were already so high that IT spending in 2026 was going to set an all-time historical record. And now, with intense shortages of these components, IT spending is going to get a double lift as prices for these components are rising fast as too much demand chases too little supply.

It is a good time to be a chip vendor and a bad time to be a customer trying to buy a certain amount of compute. The data from the latest IT spending forecasts from Gartner suggests that customers are looking around and finding the extra money so they do not miss out on the GenAI wave. A lot of that spending, of course, is centered on the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and the big AI model builders, the latter of which – notably Anthropic and OpenAI, which are trying to go public this year – are now making direct investments in infrastructure as well as renting enormous amounts of capacity wherever and whenever they can get it.

According to the latest Gartner forecast for 2026, which also includes revisions for IT spending in 2024 and 2025, the world will spend a whopping $6.32 trillion on IT hardware, software, and services, which is a 13.5 percent increase over the $5.56 trillion in spending in 2025, which itself was up 10.5 percent from the $5.04 trillion in spending in 2024.

It is great that Gartner provides such a breakdown in IT spending by category, but two years of data and an implied set of data from a third year does not give a full sense of history of IT spending. Which is why we have captured all of the data since Gartner started talking about the IT market this way in 2013 with data cast backwards to 2012. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee: “That ain’t no table. This is a table.”

Data just hanging out there in space is not particularly useful, so we like to look at global IT spending by category and then compare that growth to the change in global gross domestic product as measured by the World Bank. We also like to separate out datacenter systems spending, which is the dough the world blows for servers, switches, and storage, from what we call the core IT spending, which adds in enterprise software and IT services spending. Device spending (PCs and smartphones) and communications spending, which is part of the Gartner IT spending forecast, are interesting, but they are not really focused on the datacenter, which is where The Next Platform lives.

So let’s drill down into the new numbers and the trends, starting with IT spending growth versus global GDP growth:

That thin red line I scratched across the chart above at 2.5 percent is to level set the dataset. You can see with you own eyes that excepting the crash when the coronavirus pandemic started and then when it started to recover a year later as we all spent like crazy to upgrade our homes and companies upgraded their datacenters for the new remote world, the global GDP growth tends to be a little higher than this 2.5 percent. The average from 2013 through the 2026 forecast from the World Bank is, in fact, 2.7 percent and it really does not waver much.

That global GDP growth rate, in fact, has been trending downwards since the pandemic was over, but the explosion in IT spending and all of the consequent activity in construction for the datacenters and energy supplies has helped boost the economies, mostly in the United States with another chunk in China and the rest – a pretty small slice by comparison – spread around the rest of the world.

Overall IT spending growth is widening the gap between itself and GDP growth. In 2024, IT spending growth in the broadest sense that Gartner uses that term was up 7.4 percent, and that accelerated to 10.4 percent for 2025. IT spending for both of these years was revised upwards a bit in the April 2026 forecast. The IT spending increase for 2026 was also boosted quite a bit, to 13.5 percent. In the February forecast, which we covered here, Gartner had been expecting only a 10.8 percent increase in 2026 across all of IT.

This is obviously a big change, and it is being driven mostly by the vast investments in AI training and inference systems, mostly by the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model makers located in the United States and China. In the February forecast, Gartner was expecting for datacenter systems spending to grow by 31.7 percent in 2026 to $653.4 billion, but now the market researcher has boosted what it thought was spent in 2025 on datacenter gear by over $12 billion and now thinks that even with this higher floor for 2025 datacenter spending growth will accelerate to a mind-numbing 55.8 percent to $788 billion this year.

That is an incremental $134.6 billion in datacenter systems spending that is being forecast in a mere three months – and we will not be surprised if the number goes higher still before 2026 is done.

Just to give you a sense of scope of that number, that incremental increase in spending for datacenter gear that was added in the most recent Gartner forecast for 2026 is about the size of all datacenter systems spending in 2012 and 2013. (That is not inflation adjusted data, which it really should be based on the time horizon of the data.)

The other thing to note here is that datacenter system spending as a share of overall IT spending has grown from 4.5 percent in 2012 to 12.5 percent in 2026.

As for core IT spending, which is a broader indicator of the size of spending by organizations, growth is higher than for overall IT because devices and telecom services are pulling down the numbers. Gartner now forecasts that 18 percent growth in 2016, to just a tad over $4.1 trillion

What is really interesting is how core IT spending – datacenter hardware, software, and services – has come to dominate overall IT spending. Back in 2012, this core IT budget represented 35.9 percent of the overall IT spending pie. In 2026, with the current forecast, core IT will represent 64.9 percent of the IT budget.

This classic AI expansion, which started in earnest in 2014 or so, added a new workload to the datacenter, and the GenAI revolution is well on the way to doubling the overall size of IT spending globally.

To give you a sense of how real-world spending levels stack up across time, we have inflation adjusted the datacenter systems spending for the past, using the US consumer price index as a guide and using the value of the US dollar in 2021 as the touchstone:

This has the effect of right hand twisting the dataset around the 2021 datapoint, elevating past spending and increasingly diminishing any spending after 2021 because, as we all well know, a dollar in 2026 does not go anywhere near as far as it did in 2021. And it sure as hell doesn’t go as far as it did in 2012. The higher the inflation rates, the bigger the gaps between nominal and real spending levels. The real spending levels are what matters because that tells you about capacity, not price or revenue. But of course, a dollar also gets you a lot more capacity than it used to, in general, and this chart does not take that into account.

Someday, when I am bored*, I will try to add real datacenter capacity to the inflation adjusted datacenter systems revenues, perhaps measured in an aggregate number of ops/flops. This would be fascinating to see. But that day is not today.

* PS: I never get bored. I just get on with the next thing. As my loving wife correctly observes and reminds the children: “Only boring people get bored.” I don’t think I have ever been bored for a second, and if I was heading in that direction I could always play a song in my head or imagine living on a space station I built myself at one of the five Lagrange points between the Earth and the Sun or the Earth and the Moon, Walden style. Or take any number of a dozen problems I had on backburners in my mind and chew on them for a bit.