Global AI spending will total $2.5 trillion in 2026, says Gartner

PEX Network’s key takeaways:

• Worldwide artificial intelligence (AI) spending will total US$2.52 trillion in 2026, according to Gartner.
• AI infrastructure will drive investment this year.
• “The improved predictability of ROI must occur before AI can truly be scaled up by the enterprise.”

Worldwide AI spending is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44 percent increase year-over-year, according to Gartner.

AI infrastructure will drive AI investment this year as technology providers continue to build out AI foundations, the analyst giant has claimed. In fact, current trajectories suggest that AI spending could reach $3.3 trillion in 2027.

Gartner broke its latest AI spending outlook into specific market categories such as services, software, data, and infrastructure.

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Global AI spending to surge in 2026

Building AI foundations alone will drive a 49 percent increase in spending on AI-optimized servers for 2026, representing 17 percent of total AI spending, Gartner stated.

“AI adoption is fundamentally shaped by the readiness of both human capital and organizational processes, not merely by financial investment,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. “Organizations with greater experiential maturity and self-awareness are increasingly prioritizing proven outcomes over speculative potential.”

As AI is in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ throughout 2026, it will most often be sold to enterprises by their incumbent software provider rather than bought as part of a new moonshot project, Lovelock added. “The improved predictability of ROI must occur before AI can truly be scaled up by the enterprise.”

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Worldwide AI spending by market

Gartner published the table below outlining global AI spending by market between 2025 and 2027 (millions of US Dollars).

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The AI investment boom

The PEX Report 2025/26 found that more than half (59 percent) of businesses are planning to invest in agentic AI/AI agents in the next 12 months, followed by generative AI (58 percent), and standard/traditional AI (43 percent).

Just under a fifth of respondents (18 percent) say their business plans to invest $10,000 to $49,999 in AI, with the same number looking to spend less than $10,000. Furthermore, 16 percent are planning to invest $1 million or more, with 14 percent and 10 percent looking to spend $50,000 to $249,999 and $250,000 to $999,999, respectively. Only 8 percent have no plans to invest in AI in the next year.

CEOs are leading AI investment and strategy in more than a third (35 percent) of businesses, ahead of CTOs (18 percent), other (15 percent), heads of AI (11 percent), heads of transformation/chief transformation officers (9 percent), COOs (7 percent), and CFOs (6 percent).

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