Dive Brief:
- As IT leaders struggle to keep up with growing AI demands, spend on AI-optimized infrastructure as a service will more than double by 2026, reaching $37.5 billion, according to Gartner. Spending on the category will reach $18.3 billion this year, the analyst firm expects.
- More than half – 55% – of AI-optimized IaaS spend will be driven by inferencing rather than training workloads in 2026, according to Gartner. Enterprise investments will focus on high-performance computing resources such as GPUs and application-specific integrated circuits created for large-scale AI processing.
- “Traditional IaaS is maturing, however, AI-optimized IaaS spending growth projections are higher than that of traditional IaaS over the next five years,” Gartner Principal Analyst Hardeep Singh said in a Wednesday press release.
Dive Insight:
Demand for specialized infrastructure comes as generative and agentic AI are driving enterprises to look for options that best support modern applications of the technology.
The AI push will shape how IT teams are building their cloud infrastructure heading into 2026. IT departments will consider options such as purpose-built infrastructure optimized to support enterprise AI demands, which Info-Tech Research Group predicts will be a top technology trend in the new year.
Enterprises will require tailor-made platforms because traditional technologies, such as CPU-based IaaS, will struggle to meet enterprise AI demands, according to Singh.
“As organizations expand their use of AI and GenAI, they will need specialized infrastructure such as GPUs, tensor processing units or other AI ASICs, high-speed networking and optimized storage for fast parallel processing and data movement,” he said.
Tech giants are pouring massive resources to keep up with demand for specialized infrastructure.
The AI Infrastructure Partnership, created in 2024 and composed of investors BlackRock, Microsoft, MGX, Nvidia and xAI, have agreed to purchase Aligned Data Centers in Dallas for $40 billion in the group’s latest move to accelerate and expand AI infrastructure. Aligned provides data center products for hyperscalers and enterprises in North and South America, according to a release announcing the sale.
“We are excited about our next chapter in fueling AI expansion,” Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap said in the release.
Oracle also unveiled two critical partnerships with AMD and Nvidia this week to boost its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure amid accelerating demands for AI services.
The Nvidia partnership, in particular, will serve as the foundational underpinning for the Stargate infrastructure initiative launched by Oracle and OpenAI earlier this year. The $500 billion initiative aims to increase national AI infrastructure over the next four years.
