Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $6.37 trillion in 2026, up 14.2% on 2025, according to a Gartner press release published on 27 July 2026. Most of that growth is not companies like yours buying more software. It is infrastructure: Gartner puts data centre systems growth at 55.8% for the year. Understanding where the money is going explains why your own suppliers’ prices, roadmaps and sales pitches changed this year.
The growth is concentrated, and it isn’t in your office
Two numbers from the same Gartner forecast tell the story. Data centre systems, the servers and hardware that sit behind AI services, are the fastest growing segment at 55.8%. IT services, which covers implementation and managed services, is the largest single category in absolute terms, forecast to pass $1.87 trillion in 2026.
Separately, Gartner forecast on 19 May 2026 that worldwide AI spending would grow 47% during the year.
For a company of fifty or five hundred people, none of that is a budget line. It is context. It explains why every vendor you deal with has an AI feature this year, why cloud providers are raising capacity faster than they are cutting prices, and why implementation partners are busy.
What it changes for a mid-sized buyer
Your suppliers’ attention is expensive. When implementation work is the biggest category of spending in the market, good implementation people are in demand. If a supplier promises you a start date, ask who specifically is doing the work.
Infrastructure costs are moving under you. Growth in data centre spending eventually reaches the price of hosted services. It is worth knowing which of your costs are fixed by contract and which are not, before your renewal arrives.
“AI-powered” is not a differentiator any more. When market-wide AI spending grows 47% in a year, every product has a feature to show you. The useful question in a demo is not whether the product has AI, but which specific task it removes from a named person in your company, and what happens when it gets that task wrong.
What to do with it
Three things are worth doing this quarter, none of them expensive:
1. List what you actually run. Most companies of this size cannot produce a current list of their systems, who owns each one, and what it costs per month. That list is the beginning of every sensible decision.
2. Check what would happen if a system failed. Not the disaster scenario. The ordinary one: a server fails on a Thursday afternoon. Who notices, who fixes it, and how long does the business wait? If the answer is “one person, and they’re on holiday next week”, that’s the gap.
3. Judge new features by the task they remove. A feature that saves twenty minutes a day for a person who exists is worth more than a platform that promises transformation.
The part the forecasts don’t cover
Spending forecasts measure money, not outcomes. A business that spends less than the market average is not falling behind; a business that buys a system nobody uses has spent money for nothing. The most common expensive mistake we see is not underinvestment. It is software bought for a team that was never trained, never migrated and never asked, quietly replaced within a year by the spreadsheet it was meant to retire.
That is a decision problem, not a budget problem, and the forecasts have nothing to say about it.
Sources
- Gartner, “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 14.2% in 2026, Totaling $6.37 Trillion”, press release, 27 July 2026: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-07-27-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-it-spending-to-grow-14-point-2-percent-in-2026-totaling-6-point-37-trillion
- Gartner, “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide AI Spending to Grow 47% in 2026”, press release, 19 May 2026: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-ai-spending-to-grow-47-percent-in-2026
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