Gartner lifted its 2026 forecast for worldwide IT spending to $6.37 trillion on 27 July, a 14.2% increase on 2025's $5,577 billion. The composition matters more than the headline: almost all of the acceleration sits in one line, and the rest of the table shows where the bill is being sent.
The table
Data centre systems go from $506 billion to $822 billion, up 62.5% — after growing 51.6% the year before. Software rises from $1,271bn to $1,468bn, up 15.5%. Devices go from $790bn to $868bn, up 9.8%. IaaS grows 29.3% to $287bn. IT services manage only 5.3%, to $1,570bn, and communications services 4.4%. Separately, technology companies' own technology spending runs to roughly $1 trillion, growing 34.7%.
What the analyst said out loud
Gartner's John-David Lovelock called the compute buildout "the largest infrastructure project ever attempted by humanity" and described the buyer side plainly: "CIOs are extremely concerned about price increases coming at them from all of their vendors, and they are pushing back hard in every area where they can." The 9.8% rise in device prices is not new features — it is memory and chip cost inflation arriving in laptops.
Two numbers being misread
The $1 trillion figure is being reported as AI investment. It is not: it is total technology spending by technology companies, of which AI is a large part but not the whole. And $6.37 trillion is all IT spending, not AI spending — the closest available proxy for AI is the data centre systems line growing 62.5%. Anyone quoting the headline as an AI market size is off by an order of magnitude.
The counter-intuitive line
Buried in the forecast is the one segment moving the other way. In IT services, adding AI is producing lower price points for buyers, not higher — which is why that line grows 5.3% while hardware grows 62.5%. Where the vendor sells labour, AI deflates the price. Where the vendor sells silicon and the licences that run on it, AI inflates it. CIOs are winning exactly one of those negotiations.