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-on-year (YoY) in the first half (H1) of 2024-2025, reaching $ 31.8 billion.
As per the report, AI infrastructure market has sustained double-digit growth for nine consecutive half-years, driven primarily by investment in servers for AI deployments. In H1 2024-2025, servers accounted for 89 per cent of total spending, growing 37 per cent compared to 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 2024-2025, 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 noted that servers with an embedded accelerator are the preferred infrastructure for AI platforms accounting for 58 per cent of the total server AI infrastructure spending, growing 63 per cent in H1 2024-2025. Meanwhile, the accelerated servers will exceed 60 per cent of server AI infrastructure spending by 2028, growing at a 19 per cent five-year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR).
The report highlighted that 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 YoY growth rate in H1 2024-2025 with 56 per cent of spending coming from cloud deployments.
The report mentioned that the United States leads global AI infrastructure market, accounting for almost half of the total spending in H1 2024-2025, followed by People’s Republic of China (PRC) (23 per cent), Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) (16 per cent), and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) (10 per cent). Over the next five years, IDC expects the APJ region to grow at the fastest CAGR (20 per cent) followed by the USA (16 per cent), EMEA (13 per cent) and PRC (11 per cent). By 2028, it is forecasted that 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, cloud service providers (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 datacentres looking for alternatives to optimise their architectures and minimise energy use.”
