CIOs to Focus Budget Increases on Price Hikes in Recurrent Spending
Worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5.61 trillion in 2025, an increase of 9.8% from 2024, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.
“While budgets for CIOs are increasing, a significant portion will merely offset price increases within their recurrent spending,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “This means that, in 2025, nominal spending versus real IT spending will be skewed, with price hikes absorbing some or all of budget growth. All major categories are reflecting higher-than-expected prices, prompting CIOs to defer and scale back their true budget expectations.”
GenAI will Influence IT Spending, but IT Spending Won’t Be on GenAI Itself
Segments including data center systems, devices and software will see double-digit growth in 2025, largely due to generative AI (GenAI) hardware upgrades. However, these upgraded segments will not differentiate themselves in terms of functionality yet, even with new hardware.
"GenAI is sliding toward the trough of disillusionment which reflects CIOs declining expectations for GenAI, but not their spending on this technology," said Lovelock. “For instance, the new AI ready PCs do not yet have ‘must have’ applications that utilize the hardware. While both consumers and enterprises will purchase AI-enabled PC, tablets and mobile phones, those purchases will not be overly influenced by the GenAI functionality.”
Spending on AI-optimized servers easily doubles spending on traditional servers in 2025, reaching $202 billion dollars.
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