IT Spending Statistics: Business Budgets, Trends, and Forecasts

Worldwide IT spending is on track to reach $6.37 trillion in 2026, a 14.2% jump and the first full year above $6 trillion, according to Gartner. Almost all of that acceleration is concentrated in one place: the data center and AI infrastructure buildout. For most businesses the real question is not how big the global number is, but how much of their own revenue they should be putting into technology, and where.

What’s in This Report

1Worldwide IT Spending Hits $6.37 Trillion

The headline number keeps setting records. Gartner’s July 2026 forecast puts worldwide IT spending at $6.37 trillion for the year, a 14.2% increase over 2025. That is the first full year technology spending has sat above the $6 trillion line, and it caps a run of upward revisions: Gartner’s own estimate for 2026 climbed from $6.08 trillion in October 2025, to $6.15 trillion in February, to $6.31 trillion in April, and finally to $6.37 trillion by midyear as the scale of AI investment became clearer.

It is easy to look at a $6.37 trillion global figure and conclude that IT budgets are exploding everywhere. They are not. This total is inflated by a small number of very large buyers, hyperscalers and cloud providers pouring capital into AI data centers, and by currency effects. The spending patterns of a typical small or midsize business look very different, which is why the segment and benchmark data later in this report matter more for budgeting than the headline.

Source: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, July 2026

Setting that realistic target, and defending it to ownership, is exactly the kind of planning a fractional technology leader handles for growing businesses.

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2Where the Money Goes: IT Spending by Segment

Gartner divides IT spending into five segments, and in 2026 they are moving at wildly different speeds. Data center systems are the standout, forecast to grow 62.5% to $822 billion as providers race to build AI capacity. Software follows at 15.5% growth to $1.47 trillion, while the two largest segments by dollar value, IT services ($1.57 trillion) and communications services ($1.35 trillion), grow at a modest 5.3% and 4.4%. Devices land in the middle at 9.8% growth to $868 billion.

The chart below shows the growth rates side by side, and the story is impossible to miss: one segment is running at more than four times the pace of the rest.

There is an important nuance in the mix. Software and IT services together account for about $3.04 trillion, nearly half of all IT spending, and both are largely recurring, subscription-based costs rather than one-time purchases. That reflects a decade-long shift away from buying and owning hardware toward paying for outcomes and access, a shift that shapes how businesses of every size now build their budgets.

Source: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, July 2026

Keeping that expanding base of infrastructure and services running reliably, without runaway cost, is the day-to-day work of proactive infrastructure management.

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3AI Is the Engine Behind the Numbers

Every one of those upward revisions traces back to the same cause. Gartner forecasts worldwide spending on artificial intelligence will total roughly $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% increase over the prior year. That AI figure is a cross-cutting lens rather than a sixth segment: it spans AI infrastructure, AI models, AI services, and AI-enabled applications, and it overlaps with the data center, software, and services spending already counted in the $6.37 trillion total. The point is direction, not addition. AI is now the center of gravity for technology investment.

Most of this money is being spent by a narrow group. Gartner notes that AI spending has so far been driven by technology companies and hyperscalers building capacity, with everyday enterprises only beginning to flex their own budgets. Gartner has called 2026 the likely inflection year, the point where AI shifts from a supplier-side buildout to something ordinary businesses buy and deploy. Spending on AI-optimized servers is forecast to roughly triple over the next five years, and the short-term outlook for AI models was raised to 110% growth in 2026.

For a growing business, the sensible move is to treat AI as a feature to evaluate inside tools you already use, not a mandate to fund a separate initiative. That evaluation, and the guardrails around it, is a strategic decision worth getting right before the spending starts.

Source: Gartner Worldwide AI Spending Forecast, May 2026

Deciding where AI genuinely fits, and where it does not, is a good example of the roadmap work a fractional technology leader brings to a growing company.

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4Cybersecurity: The Line Item Nobody Cuts

If AI is the fastest-growing area of technology spending, security is the most durable. Gartner expects worldwide end-user spending on information security to grow about 12.5% in 2026 to roughly $240 billion, up from $213 billion in 2025. Unlike discretionary projects, security spending tends to hold or rise even when budgets tighten, because the cost of getting it wrong keeps climbing and regulators and insurers keep raising the bar.

Two forces are pushing security spend up at once. First, the move from on-premises systems to cloud keeps expanding the attack surface, which is why cloud security is the fastest-growing subsegment at 28.8%. Second, AI cuts both ways: businesses are spending more to secure the AI tools they adopt, and to defend against attackers who now use AI to scale phishing and reconnaissance. The result is that security has become a permanent, growing share of the budget rather than a one-time project.

Because attackers move fast, spending on continuous monitoring and rapid patching consistently outperforms a once-a-quarter approach, a pattern documented in our patch management statistics for 2026.

Source: Gartner Information Security Spending Forecast | Deloitte Global Technology Leadership Study

Putting that 10% to 20% to work as continuous protection, rather than a pile of tools nobody manages, is the job of a managed security program.

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5What Small and Midsize Businesses Actually Spend

The trillion-dollar totals can make it sound as if IT spending is an enterprise story. It is not. IDC estimates that small and midsize businesses will spend about $1.18 trillion on IT globally in 2026, up roughly 7.2% from $1.1 trillion in 2025. Widen the lens to include the midmarket and Techaisle puts worldwide SMB and midmarket IT spend at about $1.667 trillion. Small and midsize businesses are, collectively, one of the largest technology buyers on the planet.

What matters more than the totals is the change in shape. SMB budgets are shifting from capital expenditure, buying servers and perpetual software licenses, to operating expenditure, paying monthly for cloud, subscriptions, and managed services. Industry analysts note that SMBs now often spend more on the implementation, integration, management, and security of technology than on the technology itself. The product is no longer the expensive part. Making it work, keeping it running, and keeping it safe is.

That shift is why the build-versus-buy decision has become central to SMB budgeting. Hiring, training, and retaining in-house IT staff is a fixed cost that scales poorly for a small team, while a managed model converts it into a predictable line item. We break the numbers down in our comparison of the real cost of in-house versus outsourced IT, and in a step-by-step walkthrough of how to build a small business IT budget.

Source: Analysys Mason SMB IT Spending Trends | Techaisle SMB and Midmarket IT Spend 2026

Migrating from owned hardware to cloud, without the surprise bills, is a core part of a well-planned IT budget.

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6How Much Should You Spend? IT Budget Benchmarks

This is the question business owners actually ask, and the honest answer is a range, not a number. Deloitte’s Global Technology Leadership Study, based on a survey of 1,179 senior technology leaders, found the average technology budget is about 5.49% of revenue, up from 4.25% in 2020. But the average hides enormous variation. Deloitte’s data shows banking and financial services spending close to 8% of revenue on technology, while construction and manufacturing frequently spend under 2%.

The pattern is intuitive once you see it. The more a business runs on technology, and the more sensitive the data it handles, the higher its IT spend as a share of revenue. A bank is essentially a technology company with a banking license. A construction firm runs on people and equipment first. Where your business sits on that spectrum matters far more than the global average.

The most useful way to use these benchmarks is as a sanity check. If you are a professional services firm spending 1% of revenue on IT, you are almost certainly underinvesting and carrying hidden risk. If you are spending 12% with little to show for it, the problem is allocation, not budget size. A structured budget process, tied to business goals rather than last year’s number plus a bit, is what turns a percentage into a plan.

Source: Deloitte, Maximizing the Value of Technology Investments | Avasant Computer Economics IT Spending Benchmarks

Building that budget around business goals, and keeping it honest year over year, is exactly what a fractional technology leader does for companies without a full-time executive on staff. That is the difference between a number on a spreadsheet and a plan.

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David McFarlene Founder & CEO

David McFarlene is the owner and founder of CNiC Solutions, a trusted IT services and cybersecurity company serving the Houston, TX area. With over 20 years of experience in managed IT, infrastructure design, cloud solutions, and data security, David helps businesses and homeowners stay protected and productive through dependable, personalized technology support. He leads the CNiC Solutions team with a focus on reliability, transparency, and long-term relationships, ensuring clients always have a knowledgeable expert they can trust.

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