According to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), the global artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure market is on track for unprecedented growth, poised to surpass $ 100 billion in spending by 2028. Organisations increased spending on compute and storage hardware infrastructure for AI deployments by 37 per cent year-over-year in the first half of 2024, reaching $ 31.8 billion.
As per the report, the AI infrastructure market has sustained double-digit growth for nine consecutive half-years, driven primarily by investment in servers for AI deployments. In first half of 2024 (H1 2024), servers accounted for 89 per cent of the total spending, growing 37 per cent compared to the same period last year. AI Infrastructure deployed in cloud and shared environments accounts for 65 per cent of the total server spending in AI in H1 2024, as hyperscalers, cloud service providers and digital service providers expand their infrastructure capabilities. Traditional enterprises, by contrast, have largely lagged behind in adopting on-premises AI infrastructure.
The report added that servers with an embedded accelerator are the preferred infrastructure for AI platforms accounting for 58 per cent the total server AI infrastructure spending, growing 63 per cent in H1 2024. IDC projected that accelerated servers will exceed 60 per cent of the server AI infrastructure spending by 2028, growing at a 19 per cent 5-year compound average growth rate (CAGR) rate.
Further, 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 36 per cent year-over-year (YoY) growth rate in H1 2024 with 56 per cent of the spending coming from cloud deployments.
As per the report, the United States leads the global AI infrastructure market, accounting for almost half of the total spending in H1 2024, followed by People’s Republic of China (PRC) at 23 per cent, Asia Pacific (APJ) at 16 per cent, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at 10 per cent. Over the next five years, IDC estimated the APJ region to grow at the fastest CAGR of 20 per cent followed by the USA (16 per cent), EMEA (13 per cent) and PRC (11 per cent). Meanwhile, by 2028, IDC forecasted AI Infrastructure spending to reach $ 107 billion with servers deployed in cloud environments at 75 per cent of the market total and accelerated servers around 56 per cent of the total market spending.
Commenting on the report, Lidice Fernandez, group vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers, said, “IDC expects AI adoption to continue growing at a remarkable pace as hyperscalers, communication service provider (CSPs), private companies, and governments around the world are increasingly prioritising AI. Growing concerns around energy consumption for AI infrastructure will become a factor in data centres looking for alternatives to optimise their architectures and minimise energy use.”
