Gartner now expects worldwide IT spending to reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, a rise of 13.5% on 2025, raised from $6.15 trillion earlier in the year. Almost all of the new money is going into AI infrastructure.
If there is an AI line in your budget this year, you are part of that $6.31 trillion. Here is the uncomfortable part. Most of it buys infrastructure that changes nothing about how your business actually works, and the leaders who confuse the two will spend a fortune and have nothing to show their people for it.
A forecast that keeps climbing
When I wrote about Gartner’s outlook in late 2024, the open question was whether enterprises would pull back. Through 2025 many did, in what Gartner described as an uncertainty pause, a deliberate hold on net-new initiatives. Spending rose anyway, and the 2026 number has since been revised upward twice. The growth is concentrated where the AI build-out is loudest: data center systems, where Gartner expects spending to grow by more than 55% as hyperscalers race to stand up AI-optimized compute, and software and services, where generative AI is quietly lifting the cost of tools companies already run. On Gartner’s figures, IT services alone will pass $1.87 trillion and software will approach $1.44 trillion.
Spending is up while expectations have come down
The detail most leaders skip past is the split Gartner keeps naming. Expectations for generative AI have slid into what it calls the trough of disillusionment, even as spending on it rises. The hard numbers explain the mood: MIT’s 2025 report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business, found that about 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots had delivered no measurable return. Read that again. Organizations are putting more money into AI in the same year they have quietly lowered what they expect it to do. That is not a contradiction. It is exactly what a real technology shift looks like from the inside: after the launch excitement, before the compounding returns.
Buying infrastructure is not the same as getting value
The overwhelming share of this $6.31 trillion is infrastructure: servers, data centers, memory, the plumbing of AI. I have led enterprise transformation from inside this market, at IBM and as Cognizant’s Nordic CTO and Innovation Officer, and the pattern never changes. The organizations that see a return are not the ones that bought the most technology. They are the ones that did the human work alongside it. AI is a culture project before it is a procurement line. The hardware arrives in weeks; the change in how people decide, trust and work takes leadership, and that is the line item that never shows up in Gartner’s table.
What this means for you
If you sit on a board or lead a team, three things follow from this forecast. First, separate the infrastructure decision from the value decision. Knowing the market will spend more than $6 trillion tells you nothing about what your people should do on Monday morning. Second, treat lowered AI expectations as the buying signal, not the warning. The noise is leaving and the real work is starting, and this is the window in which moving first compounds. Third, budget for the human side as deliberately as the technical side, because that is where the return on all this spending is won or lost.
The number will keep rising, and the next wave, the move to embodied AI and robotics, will raise the stakes again. The leaders who benefit will be the ones who invest in capability and culture, not only in compute. If the human side is the part you are wrestling with, that is the conversation I have with leadership teams, and it is worth starting before the budget is spent, not after.
Frequently asked questions
How much will global IT spending reach in 2026?
Gartner expects worldwide IT spending to reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, up 13.5% on 2025, and the figure has been revised upward twice. Almost all of the new money is going into AI infrastructure, with data center systems alone forecast to grow by more than 55%.
If spending is rising, why does Gartner say expectations have fallen?
Because the two move independently. Expectations for generative AI have slipped into what Gartner calls the trough of disillusionment even as spending climbs. MIT’s 2025 report found about 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots delivered no measurable return, which explains the mood, and it is exactly what a real technology shift looks like after the launch excitement and before the compounding returns.
Why will most of the $6.31 trillion be wasted?
Because the overwhelming share buys infrastructure, servers, data centers, memory, that changes nothing about how a business actually works. The organizations that see a return are not the ones that bought the most technology, but the ones that did the human work alongside it. AI is a culture project before it is a procurement line.
What should a leader actually do in response to this forecast?
Three things: separate the infrastructure decision from the value decision, treat lowered AI expectations as the buying signal rather than the warning, and budget for the human side as deliberately as the technical side. That human line item never appears in Gartner’s table, but it is where the return is won or lost.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organizations including IBM, the WHO, the World Governments Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.