Datacenter Spending Forecast Revised Upwards - Yet Again
The Next Platform, Monday, February 9th, 2026
This is turning into a 'dog bites man' story, but the forecasts for spending in the datacenter for this year keep going up and up, and a few days ago Gartner's economists and prognosticators finished up their tea and looked at the leaves at the bottom of a cup through a polished crystal ball and predicted that datacenter spending this year would go up.
This comes as no surprise with Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Oracle all saying in the past two weeks that they would collectively be increasing their capital expenditures this year by an average of 80 percent to $705 billion, injecting $230 billion more spending into this year. About 90 percent of that combined capex is for datacenter gear, and the lion's share of that is for AI gear, so the wonder is why IDC's forecast for spending on datacenter systems in 2026 was only revised upwards by 10.9 percent and representing $71 billion in spending.