IDC Makes Ebullient AI Spending Forecast Out To 2029
The Next Platform, Monday, September 8th, 2025
Ever since Nvidia reported its most recent financial results, where company co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang said that there would be somewhere between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in spending on AI between now and the end of the decade, we have been on the prowl for any market research that backs up this claim or is its source.
We poked around a bit and found a forecast that IDC put out just before the Labor Day holiday, which is ironic given how much the future of AI is agentic and how this is largely going to have systems talking to systems and making decisions without humans in the loop except for oversight.
IDC is not saying much publicly about the forecast, of course, because it wants to charge $7,500 a pop for the report it has put together. But its market researchers did say a few things in its public statements promoting that report, which we can glean for some insight and used to compare with other forecasts. (We expect all forecasts to converge, more or less, as the enthusiasm for increased spending rises.)