Ahmed Sherif
Research expert covering IT services and gaming hardware
IT budgets & investments - Statistics & Facts
In today's fast-paced world, where digital transformation is revolutionizing industries, the IT infrastructure has emerged as the backbone of organizational success, essential for thriving in the competitive landscape. Businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations are all examples of sectors where this is true. The overall global IT spending of businesses and governments on tech goods and services is a trillion-dollar industry today that can be broken down into different segments and deployment types to account for individual spending.
Overall, digital transformation and a push towards AI adoption has reshaped IT budgeting priorities, driving organizations to allocate more resources and higher budgets to ramp up their automation capabilities, cloud infrastructure, and security reliability.
IT budgets increasing with cybersecurity and cloud technology in the lead
IT budgets remain an essential cornerstone to organizations around the world. In North America and Europe, the majority of IT professionals expected their company’s IT budget to increase in 2025. This is because business success today correlates with technology competence, which is illustrated by the convergence of technology and business strategy. Therefore, it is not surprising that businesses are investing in a plethora of technologies to make their business operations more efficient. Cybersecurity, cloud services, and digital transformation remain among the leading IT priorities according to IT business leaders globally. Moreover, spending on data centers is also expected to increase to a record 260 billion U.S. dollars in 2024.AI investments on the rise
Since the release of ChatGPT, corporate interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has increased dramatically worldwide. In 2024, the adoption of artificial intelligence among global organizations has surged, with 72 percent integrating AI into at least one business function, up from 55 percent the previous year. Notably, generative AI has been adopted by 65 percent of organizations, marking an increase of over 30 percentage points and highlighting AI as a mainstream business tool. This interest is reflected in the global expenditure on AI-centric systems, estimated at 154 billion U.S. dollars across all industries in 2023. The banking sector led the way with investments totaling over 20 billion U.S. dollars, followed closely by retail. When it came to direct investments in AI companies, OpenAI was unsurprisingly by far the most funded machine learning/AI company worldwide in 2024.Overall, digital transformation and a push towards AI adoption has reshaped IT budgeting priorities, driving organizations to allocate more resources and higher budgets to ramp up their automation capabilities, cloud infrastructure, and security reliability.
