Drive for AI and data to push tech spend over $6trillion

It seems businesses large and small have dismissed fears of an impending “AI and data crash”, with technology spending set to rise 10.8% in 2026 to reach $6.15trillion, as more and more companies join the data-driven revolution.

So says a new report from Gartner, which dismisses fears of the bubble bursting and concerns about inconsistent tariff policies from US President Donald Trump.

The increase will largely be driven by AI spending, projected to rise by 80.8% from 2025, and by data centre builds, up 31.7%.

While Gartner sees spending increases in all five tech categories it tracks, spending on communications services will rise by only 4.7%, and spending on devices, PCs, and laptops will increase by only 6.1%, with skyrocketing memory costs prompting many buyers to delay device purchases.

The huge increase in AI spending, coming from every size of business, will put pressure on tech chiefs to ratchet down spending elsewhere, and many have turned to their services budgets to save cash.

At the same time, tech buyers expect that services providers are using AI to assist their efforts and cut costs, and they are demanding that those savings be passed on to them.

Gartner vice president analyst John-David Lovelock said: “Services companies are almost penalised because the expectation is that they are going to be using some form of AI or agents or assistance within the delivery. Tech chiefs need to find somewhere that they have control of their budget, and they can pick on the services companies because they’re using AI.”

The AI spending hike, meanwhile, is happening while many observers fear that a stock market bubble is about to pop. Disillusionment about generative AI is high right now, Lovelock says, and concerns about AI agents are building.

But over the longer term, a major shift from an old information technology model to a new intelligence technology model is happening, creating value for AI firms, he adds.

“We’re going to have some people limping along for a while, but we are at the very early years of the new super cycle, which is intelligence technology,” he says. “It’s going to rewrite the rules of value creation, it’s going to rewrite the rules of revenue, and it’s going to rewrite where growth is.”