Companies are spending ever more on IT, Gartner’s market specialists note. For 2025, they predict that spending will increase by 9.3 percent compared to 2024. Overall, they expect a total of 5.74 trillion dollars (5.28 trillion euros) spending on IT worldwide next year.
Gartner indicates in its survey that the expected growth in IT spending in 2025 is due in part to the use of GenAI. Companies are already investing heavily in the infrastructure needed for these types of solutions and applications, as well as proofs-of-concept, but they will move a step further to real production solutions in 2025.
Server market growing
This means, among other things, that the server market to support GenAI will boom in 2025. Gartner expects companies to spend 257 billion dollars on server equipment in the coming year. By 2028, it will reach 332 billion dollars, tripling compared to 2023, when 134 billion dollars was spent on servers.
Spending on data center systems, of which servers are a component, grew 35 percent this year. The market researchers predict that growth will slow down a little next year. The projected 2025 spending in this overarching market segment is expected to be 15.5 percent or about 50 billion dollars. Ultimately, this will still likely result in expenditures of 367.17 billion dollars.
Gartner does add a caveat to the high demand for GenAI. The market specialists think that companies’ high expectations for GenAI will get something of a reality check. This is because LLMs and the state of the enterprise data these models draw from don’t meet current needs and requirements yet. More quality and applicability are needed for this development to really take off, both in the case of LLMs and the data sources they work with.
Software and services are trusted growth suppliers
Other key IT segments companies spend heavily on are software and IT services. Software spending will likely grow 14 percent by 2025 to 1.23 billion dollars. For this year, that growth rate has been 11.7 percent. Spending on IT services will increase 9.4 percent next year, to 1.73 billion dollars. For this year, it is 5.6 percent.
Again, Gartner’s specialists see an important role in companies’ AI-related projects for these segments. This includes AI spending related to email and productivity solutions. In total, both market segments add 6.6 billion dollars to global spending in 2024 and 7.4 billion dollars in 2025, in large part because of GenAI products and services.
Future projections
Because Gartner seems to be aggregating different types of spending in those latter numbers, this is not easily reflected in the stat above, which shows the forecast by type of spending, also without explicitly mentioning GenAI spending.
In the future, Gartner expects global IT spending to continue to grow by 500 billion dollars annually. If this expected annual growth continues, global IT spending could pass the 7 trillion dollar mark by 2028, the market specialists believe. As seen in the article below (which is from January of this year), Gartner has revised upward its projections for this year in the interim.
Read more: Gartner: Global IT spending to grow to $5 trillion in 2024