NEEDHAM, Mass., October 28, 2025 – The global Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure market is on track for unprecedented growth, poised to reach $758 billion USD in spending by 2029, according to the latest findings from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Tracker. Organizations increased spending on compute and storage hardware infrastructure for AI deployments by 166% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2025, reaching $82.0 billion.
The AI infrastructure market has consistently sustained high double-digit growth for a few years, driven primarily by investment in servers for AI deployments. Infrastructure deployed in cloud and shared environments accounts for 84.1% of the total spending in AI in 2Q25, with hyperscalers, cloud service providers and digital service providers as the largest contributors to AI spending (86.7%) in the quarter. In 2Q25, servers accounted for 98% of the total AI Centric spending, growing 173.2% compared to the same period last year. Servers with an embedded accelerator are the preferred infrastructure for AI platforms, accounting for 91.8% of the total server AI infrastructure spending—growing 207.3% in the second quarter of the year 2025. IDC projects that accelerated servers will exceed 95% of the server AI infrastructure spending by 2029, growing at a 42% 5-year CAGR.
Most of the larger changes in the AI server forecast are due to a significant reassessment of GPU and other accelerators’ server demand in the US, replacing a previously expected slowdown in late 2025 and early 2026 with a new expectation that the AI investment ramp will continue through the end of this year and into 2026, based on continuously growing pipelines from major vendors and buyers.
“There is a distinct possibility that more AI-related investment will be announced in the coming years that will add to and extend the current mass deployment phase of accelerated servers well into 2026 and even beyond,” said Lidice Fernandez, group vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers. “IDC expects AI adoption to be mainly driven by hyperscalers and cloud service providers along with AI based research and education projects gaining importance by the end of the forecast period.”
Storage spending in AI infrastructure has been driven by the need to manage large datasets required for training AI models, as well as storage of training, checkpoints and repositories of data for inference phases. This category reported a 20.5% year-over-year growth in 2Q25 with 48% of the spending coming from cloud deployments.
The United States leads the global AI infrastructure market, accounting for 76% of the total spending in 2Q25, followed by PRC (11.6%), APJ (6.9%), and EMEA (4.7%). Over the next five years, IDC expects the PRC region to grow at the fastest CAGR (41.5%) followed by the USA (40.5%), EMEA (17.3%) and APJ (14.3%). By 2029, IDC forecast AI Infrastructure spending to reach $758Bn with accelerated servers accounting for 94.3% of the total market spending.
Taxonomy Notes
IDC defines AI type considered AI centric in the server and storage categories including systems that run one or more of the following applications:
• AI platforms dedicated to AI application development; most AI training occurs here.
- AI applications whose prime function is to execute AI models; most AI inferencing happens in this category.
- AI-enabled (traditional) applications with some AI functionality
- AI application development and deployment (AD&D) software used to develop AI models and applications
The full taxonomy including definitions can be found in IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Tracker Taxonomy, 2025 Fundamentally, the reporting of AI hardware in the AI Infrastructure Tracker a “workloads based” view of the server and storage markets, defined in IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Workloads Taxonomy, 2024 ).
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly AI Infrastructure Tracker® is a comprehensive global data tool that details vendor share and forecast information on server and storage systems running artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The tracker is built on the strong foundation of IDC’s vendor product and market modeling methodology coupled with its extensive network of worldwide and local expertise across the globe, ensuring that the market competition and opportunities are represented true to reality.
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