Gartner Forecasts $42B AI-Optimized IaaS Spending in 2026

Market research firm Gartner predicts that global spending on AI-optimized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will reach $42 billion in 2026, up 96% year-over-year. This service provides cloud infrastructure optimized for AI training, inference, and model deployment, allowing users to access resources on demand without building their own server clusters.

With the accelerated adoption of agentic AI scenarios, global AI inference spending is expected to hit $23.3 billion in 2026, surpassing the $19 billion for training. Inference tasks will account for 55% of AI-optimized IaaS spending, rising to 59% by 2027, shifting cloud infrastructure investment priorities. Gartner Senior Principal Analyst Hardeep Singh says inference spending has now overtaken training, marking a shift from experimentation to real production use.

Total global IaaS spending is projected to grow from $222.17 billion in 2025 to $287.35 billion in 2026, a 29.3% increase, reaching $359.90 billion by 2027.