Global IT spending will reach nearly $6.4T in 2026, Gartner says

Might want to pal around with your IT folks at the watercooler: IT spending globally will reach $6.37 trillion in 2026, a 14% climb from 2025 and up $60 billion from the company’s April estimate.

The revision increased forecasts for data center systems spend, anticipating 62.5% growth in 2026, up from nearly 56% in the April forecast.

The focus on data center spending reflects “accelerating investment in AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, and intelligent applications,” John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, noted in a press release. “Driven by the expansion of AI workloads and demand for high-performance computing, hyperscalers and enterprises are rapidly scaling next-generation data center capacity.”

Okay, okay. Companies are spending on AI and data centers like their lives depend on it, and we already knew that. But given the revisions to previous forecasts, it’ll be especially interesting to see the vector of future data center spending.

And then there’s this, from Gartner’s Lovelock:

“Despite the strong growth in spending, this is not a rising tide lifts all boats market trend,” Lovelock said. “Technology budgets are being strained by inflation, supply shortages, rising hardware and memory costs, AI funding initiatives, and shifting priorities.”

Those “shifting priorities” are already fairly evident: Increasingly, investors seem cautious about the gargantuan amounts of planned AI capex. Alphabet raised its 2026 capex projection to $205 billion amid growing AI infrastructure plans, only to see its share price sink after it reported earnings on July 22.

Still, on a Q2 earnings call, CFO Anat Ashkenazi noted that Alphabet is “still in a supply-constrained environment…And we are seeing very strong demand, both from external cloud customers as well as across the business…We take a multiyear view at what the needs are as well as focus on next year and the near term and building aggressively to meet those demands,” Ashkenazi said.

If Alphabet is struggling to prove AI bets are paying off, everyone else probably is, too: Nine in 10 CFOs and finance leaders recently said they’re under pressure to show ROI on AI investments, according to a survey released July 21 by agentic AI tax and compliance provider Avalara.