Gartner Radically Raises Datacenter Spending Forecasts
The Next Platform, Monday, October 27th, 2025
Back in early September, the prognosticators at IDC put out an ebullient but simple AI spending forecast going out to 2029, and Gartner followed suit with a much more detailed AI spending forecast, which we augmented and expanded with the help of the market researcher a few weeks later.
Now, Gartner has circled back and revised its overall IT spending forecast given the explosive spending on GenAI hardware for the model builders and their partners.
This bigtime spending, says Gartner, is finally spurring investments by enterprises, particularly for AI-infused software that is more expensive than prior generations of code that did not have it. People are definitely paying for copilots and code assistants and other AI functions in their ERP, SCM, CRM, and other suites. And that, as well as the humongous datacenter system spending by the AI model builders and their cloud partners, is driving IT spending to new heights, with the expectation for overall global IT spending, as reckoned in US dollars, rising above $6 trillion for the first time in 2026.