Gartner Forecasts 96% Growth in Worldwide AI-Optimized IaaS Spending for 2026

Gartner, Inc. projects that global spending on AI-optimized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will surge by 96% in 2026, reaching $42 billion. This significant growth is attributed to the escalating demand for infrastructure to support large language model (LLM) training and the rapid operationalization of AI across enterprise applications and workflows. The forecast also indicates that inference workloads will surpass training spending in 2026, reshaping cloud investment priorities.