Gartner's April 2026 quarterly update to its worldwide IT spending forecast projects total enterprise technology spending to reach $6.31 trillion this year, a year-on-year increase of 13.5 per cent. That is the fastest headline growth rate the series has posted in more than a decade, and the highest single-year IT spending figure ever recorded by the Gartner IT spending index.
The forecast matters not because $6.31 trillion is an interesting number, but because the composition of the spending is changing at a pace the vendor market has never had to absorb before. Data-centre systems, historically the smallest of the four Gartner segments, is growing at 55.8 per cent. Enterprise software, at $1.44 trillion, is being rewritten under the demands of generative-AI features. IT services, the largest single line, is bumping up against a talent-supply constraint. Communications services, once the growth driver of the whole index, is now the drag.
The four segments
Gartner reports worldwide IT spending across four segments: data-centre systems, devices, software (which it calls enterprise software) and IT services, plus a communications-services line reported separately. The current-year forecast is:
- Data-centre systems: over $788 billion, up 55.8 per cent year on year. This is the AI-infrastructure line and includes GPU and accelerator hardware, hyperscaler builds, high-density networking and the associated cooling and power.
- Enterprise software: $1.44 trillion, up from roughly $1.2 trillion in the prior comparable estimate. Growth is concentrated in the AI-native categories — copilots, agent frameworks, vector databases, LLM-ops platforms — but has spread through the wider SaaS market as incumbent vendors ship generative features and reprice.
- IT services: forecast above $1.87 trillion, still the largest single category. Consulting and system-integration work around AI deployments is the dominant driver, with the top-tier system integrators reporting AI-related revenue lines in the tens of billions of dollars for the first time.
- Devices and communications services: growing more slowly. Devices is expected to post low single-digit growth as the enterprise PC refresh cycle catches up on the pandemic-era pull-forward. Communications services is the only segment tracking below general inflation.
Why the numbers have moved so quickly
The single biggest reason the 2026 figures look qualitatively different from the 2023 or 2024 baselines is that the artificial-intelligence economy has now entered what the Gartner research organisation calls the "heavy-capital" phase. Model training and large-scale inference is capital-intensive in a way that most previous software categories were not: a single hyperscaler AI training cluster can consume more capital equipment in a quarter than a mid-cap enterprise consumes in a decade.
The knock-on effect through the rest of the IT budget is significant but under-appreciated. Enterprises building generative-AI capabilities on top of hyperscaler infrastructure are running up against the same GPU-supply constraint that the hyperscalers themselves face, and are re-signing longer-duration cloud commitments to secure allocation. That in turn is reshaping the SaaS renewals cycle: multi-year commitments have jumped from an industry average of roughly 24 months in 2022 to closer to 40 months in early 2026.
The enterprise software split
The $1.44 trillion enterprise-software line breaks down, at the top level, roughly as follows in Gartner's segmentation:
- Application software, including CRM, ERP, HCM and vertical suites — the largest single sub-segment.
- Infrastructure software, including cloud management, container platforms, security software, database systems and observability.
- Application development, integration and quality software, growing rapidly as the AI-agent build-out drives demand for orchestration and evaluation tooling.
The growth rates within these categories vary sharply. Database systems, driven by vector-database growth and the incumbents' AI-native rewrites, is expected to grow faster than the segment average. Traditional office productivity, notionally boosted by generative-AI copilots, is growing more slowly than the top-line vendor commentary would suggest — much of the copilot pricing is being absorbed as a price rise rather than as new-seat expansion.
Data-centre systems: the AI capex story
The 55.8 per cent growth in data-centre systems is the single most striking line item in Gartner's forecast. To put it in context, that segment grew at 4.2 per cent in 2019, at 6.9 per cent in 2022, and at 11.5 per cent in 2024. The 2026 figure is more than five times the recent average.
The capital-expenditure disclosures from the hyperscalers underline what is happening. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta together guided to more than $300 billion in 2026 capital expenditure on their latest earnings calls, the overwhelming majority tagged to AI infrastructure. Oracle's recent commentary on multi-year cloud-infrastructure commitments, and the extension of the OpenAI-related infrastructure agreements, indicate that the current AI capex cycle has substantially longer duration than most equity-side analysts assumed in early 2025.
IT services: the talent constraint
The IT services line, forecast above $1.87 trillion, is the largest by revenue but the tightest in terms of supply. The Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Deloitte and EY commentary in the first quarter of 2026 all pointed to the same underlying issue: AI-transformation demand exceeds the addressable senior-consultant pool.
The industry response so far has been a step-change in graduate hiring at the top-tier system integrators, extensive internal reskilling programmes and, most visibly, an escalation of bench-based partnerships with independent AI-model providers. It has also produced a sustained gross-margin compression across the segment, with several of the listed firms guiding to a 100 to 200 basis-point decline in operating margin for the current fiscal year.
The cyber-security line inside the software segment
Cyber-security software, tracked by Gartner both as a sub-segment of infrastructure software and separately in its security and risk-management practice, is one of the fastest-growing lines in the enterprise stack. Gartner's separate security-spending forecast puts the 2026 figure above $215 billion, with endpoint protection, cloud security posture management (CSPM) and identity threat detection and response (ITDR) the fastest-growing sub-categories.
The Magic Quadrant reports Gartner publishes for individual security categories have become one of the most closely-watched procurement signals in enterprise IT, in part because the security-buyer procurement cycle has compressed and consolidated. Enterprises are consolidating security vendors aggressively, with the Palo Alto Networks platformisation story — cross-sell of Cortex, Prisma and Strata into single-vendor renewals — one of the most-cited examples in vendor-side commentary.
Case study: the 2026 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms
The most recently-published Gartner Magic Quadrant in the endpoint-security category, released in the second quarter of 2026, named Palo Alto Networks a Leader for the fourth consecutive year. That is a useful lens onto how the Gartner spending forecasts translate into vendor-side narratives.
Palo Alto's marketing around the report leans heavily on the agentic-AI angle: the argument that autonomous AI agents inside enterprises constitute a new attack surface that legacy endpoint detection-and-response was not designed to cover. The company positions its Cortex portfolio, and specifically the XDR product it pioneered in 2018, as the incumbent solution to that emerging problem.
Whether Gartner's own analysis in the Magic Quadrant supports that framing at the same level of confidence is a separate question — the Magic Quadrant methodology explicitly separates the analyst view from the vendor positioning. The relevant point for the wider spending forecast is that agentic-AI-related security is one of the few 2026 IT categories where enterprise willingness to expand net-new budget lines is unambiguous. Chief information security officers surveyed by Gartner in the same quarter reported an average 18 per cent increase in AI-security line items compared with the prior year, well above the 13.5 per cent headline IT growth rate.
What the numbers tell us about the vendor landscape
Four vendor-side implications are worth noting.
First, the concentration of spend in AI infrastructure benefits a small number of firms disproportionately. Nvidia continues to capture the largest share of data-centre-systems spend growth. The AI-optimised server OEMs — Dell, HPE, Supermicro — are the next layer down.
Second, the top three hyperscalers now capture a materially larger share of the enterprise cloud commitment. This is not a new trend but 2026 is the first year in which every large-enterprise cloud commitment survey Gartner runs puts the top-three share above 80 per cent.
Third, the enterprise-SaaS incumbents are protecting revenue in a way that surprised the equity market in the first quarter. Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle all posted stronger-than-expected renewals through the period, with the AI-copilot revenue attaching to existing seats rather than expanding total seat counts.
Fourth, the challenger tier in each software category is under sustained pressure. The consolidation dynamic that has characterised the security market since 2023 is now visible in observability, in developer tooling and in data platforms.
Quick reference: Gartner worldwide IT spending, 2026 forecast
| Segment | 2026 forecast | Growth (YoY) | Principal driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data-centre systems | >$788 bn | +55.8% | Hyperscaler AI infrastructure build-out |
| Enterprise software | $1.44 tn | Double digits | AI features embedded across the SaaS stack |
| IT services | >$1.87 tn | High single digits | AI-transformation consulting and integration |
| Devices | c. $770 bn (est.) | Low single digits | Enterprise PC refresh; AI-PC uplift |
| Communications services | c. $1.4 tn (est.) | Below inflation | Telco pricing pressure, unit-price decline |
| Total worldwide IT spending | $6.31 tn | +13.5% | AI infrastructure and software combined |
Frequently asked questions
How big is the global IT market in 2026?
Gartner's April 2026 forecast puts worldwide IT spending at $6.31 trillion, a 13.5 per cent year-on-year increase and the highest single-year figure in the series' history. The comparable IDC and Forrester tracking series produce slightly different totals because of methodological differences in what is included in "IT spending," but the direction of travel is the same.
How much is enterprise software spending in 2026?
Gartner puts the enterprise-software segment at $1.44 trillion in 2026, up from roughly $1.2 trillion in the comparable prior-year estimate. The growth is disproportionately concentrated in AI-native categories and in the AI-feature-driven repricing of incumbent SaaS products.
What is driving the 55 per cent growth in data-centre spending?
The AI-infrastructure build-out is the single dominant factor. Hyperscaler capital expenditure guided at more than $300 billion for 2026 across the top four operators, driven by GPU and accelerator procurement, data-centre construction, and the associated networking, cooling and power infrastructure.
Which IT category is the largest by spend?
IT services, at over $1.87 trillion in 2026, remains the largest single Gartner segment. Consulting and system-integration work related to AI deployments is the current growth driver, but the segment overall has been the largest for most of the past decade.
What is a Gartner Magic Quadrant?
The Magic Quadrant is Gartner's flagship comparative-analysis format for enterprise-technology categories, ranking vendors on two axes ("completeness of vision" and "ability to execute") and grouping them into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The 2026 EPP Magic Quadrant named Palo Alto Networks a Leader for the fourth consecutive year.
How does Gartner's forecast compare with IDC or Forrester?
IDC's 2026 worldwide black-book estimate for IT and business services combined is broadly consistent with Gartner's, in the low $6 trillion range, although IDC includes some categories Gartner reports separately. Forrester's tech-market forecast tracks a smaller aggregate because it excludes telecom services. The three series historically converge on the direction and magnitude of growth even when the absolute totals differ.
