Gartner: AI IaaS spending to surge 96% to $42B in 2026

Gartner, the leading IT research and advisory firm, predicts that worldwide spending on AI-optimized infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will surge 96% in 2026, reaching $42 billion. This explosive growth is fueled by two primary forces: the relentless demand for computing power to train large language models (LLMs), and the accelerating integration of AI into mainstream enterprise applications. Cloud providers are rushing to expand their AI-ready GPU clusters and specialized hardware to meet this demand, making IaaS the fastest-growing segment in the cloud infrastructure market.

A key highlight of the forecast is the shifting balance between AI training and AI inference. In 2026, inference—the process of running trained models to generate predictions and responses—will overtake training for the first time, representing 55% of total AI-optimized IaaS spending. This milestone reflects the maturation of AI from a research exercise to a production workload. As more companies deploy AI agents, chatbots, and real-time analytics, the need for low-latency inference infrastructure becomes paramount. Gartner's analysis suggests that enterprises should prepare for a significant increase in cloud costs and prioritize AI workload optimization, while cloud vendors stand to benefit enormously from this spending boom.