Global IT spending is on track to top $6 trillion next year. Server sales in this year’s second quarter nearly doubled. IoT is gaining real-time analytics. And more people say they use AI at work.
That’s the latest from leading IT market watchers and pollsters. And here’s your Research Roundup.
IT Spending Forecast
IT spending worldwide will rise by nearly 10% next year, topping $6 trillion for the first time, predicts Gartner.
The industry watcher says a big driver of spending is the rise of Generative AI. It’s bringing new features and functionality, and these cost more money, Gartner says. It predicts global spending on software will total $1.43 trillion in 2026 — that's 15% higher than it will be this year.
Other fast-growing sectors, Gartner predicts, will be data center systems (with 2026 spending growth projected at 19%), IT services (8.7%) and devices (6.8%).
But IT buyers aren’t waiting for 2026. “A significant budget flush is anticipated before the end of the year,” says Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock.
Q2 Server Sales Nearly Doubled
In the second quarter, global spending on servers nearly doubled, rising by 97.3% year-on-year, according to IDC. The market watcher attributes this rise to what it calls a “mass deployment” of GPUs.
Server sales by units were also strong. In Q2, they rose by nearly 16% from the year-ago quarter, IDC says.
Buyers of servers generally fall into one of two camps: either large cloud service providers (CSPs) or end-user organizations. Looking ahead, IDC expects CSPs to continue expanding their infrastructure through at least 2029. End users, by contrast, will work to balance spending between their on-premises deployments and cloud services they buy from others.
Looking ahead to the next five years, IDC forecasts global server sales rising by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 29%. Shorter term, IDC predicts global server sales will rise from $455.4 billion this year to $565.9 billion next year, a one-year increase of just over 24%.
IoT Going Real-Time
For Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, the dominant technology priority is real-time analytics.
So finds a survey conducted by market watcher Omdia that reached over 600 enterprises in 10 countries. Fully 82% of organizations surveyed said they either use real-time data processing capabilities now or plan to soon.
“Strong adoption of 5G and edge computing are laying the groundwork for real-time analytics,” says John Canali, an Omdia market analyst. “We’re seeing IoT evolve from simple data collection to process automation.”
All this IoT creates a lot of data. To process it all, over 75% of enterprises are supplementing their IoT systems with additional services such as AI and machine learning, Omdia finds. Their larger goal: Transforming business operations from reactive to predictive.
Will there be a payoff, and if so, how quick? Nearly all respondents to the Omdia survey (95%) said they expect to see measurable benefits from IoT within two years.
More People Using AI at Work
Artificial intelligence is slowly but surely working its way into real life, finds a survey by the Pew Research Center. The survey finds that roughly one in five U.S. workers (21%) now use AI in their jobs. That’s up from 16% a year ago.
Pew conducted the survey in September, connecting with respondents both online and by phone. Responses were collected from 8,750 randomly selected U.S. adults.
As the survey shows, some things about AI haven’t changed. A year ago, Pew found that a tiny 2% of U.S. adults were doing all or most of their work with AI. This year it was also 2%.
Similarly, last year about two-thirds of Pew’s respondents (65%) said they don’t use AI much or at all while on the job. That response rate was also unchanged this time.
One factor has changed: Fewer people admit to a lack of AI knowledge. A year ago, 17% of U.S. adults surveyed by Pew said they had not heard or read much about AI. This year, that group shrank to 12%.
Another change: More people think at least some parts of their job could be done by AI. A year ago, 31% of respondents agreed with that statement; this year, that rose to 36% of all.