Gartner Raises 2025 IT Spending Forecast, Puts Out 2026 Prediction

November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have your boss pegging your pay increases to the growth in the IT market, you are going to outpace the inflation that is helping to buoy IT spending worldwide. The spreadsheet wizards and economists at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending for the third time this year for 2025, and have also recently put out an initial forecast for what IT spending will look like in 2026.

As a refresher, here is how Gartner pegged IT spending by the major categories back in its July forecast for both 2024, which had ended, and for 2025, which was a little more than half-way complete:

Back in July, Gartner was watching the GenAI boom take off and revised spending for datacenter systems – meaning serving, switching, storage, and systems software – upwards quite a bit for 2025, expecting for it to hit $474.9 billion, up 42.4 percent for the year compared to 2024. Overall core IT spending including systems, all software, and services, was expected to rise by 10.8 percent this year to $3.39 trillion.

With the October revision, Gartner is now projecting that datacenter systems spending in 2025 will rise by 46.8 percent to $489.5 billion, which is an incremental $14.6 billion in spending in the datacenter for hardware and base systems software. The core IT spending is now projected to hit $3.45 trillion, an incremental $59.8 billion in spending and representing a 12.5 percent growth over the $3.06 trillion in core IT spending in 2024.

The public pronouncements from Gartner did not have any specific estimates about what datacenter systems spending or overall core IT spending in the datacenter (meaning, with IT services and enterprise software, but not including telecom and data services or sales of devices such as PCs, tablets, and smartphone) would be in 2026 back in July forecast, but the October forecast does:

Gartner says that datacenter systems spending growth will slow to 19 percent in 2026, to $582.4 billion, but even this slowing growth will still outpace the rate of global gross domestic product in the coming year, which is expected to increase by 2.5 percent. Core IT spending will only grow by 12.5 percent to $3.89 trillion, still many times global GDP growth. That is an incremental $93 billion in datacenter systems spending and an incremental $431.7 billion in core IT spending (which again includes systems, enterprise software, and IT services). This is a lot of incremental money, obviously, and almost all of it appears to be to the GenAI revolution but some of it is for system and software upgrades.

Overall IT spending for 2025 is now expected to be $5.54 trillion, up 10 percent compared to 2024, and will grow another 9.8 percent next year to hit $6.08 trillion. This is the first time that global IT spending has broken through $6 trillion in a year.

Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? Especially when you consider that IT spending worldwide only broke through $1 trillion in 2007 – and just barely at that – according to statistics from Gartner.

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