Gartner: 13.5% IT Growth by 2026 – CIOs Must Shift Strategies

07.05.2026

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On April 22, 2026, Gartner raised the global IT spending forecast for 2026 to €6.310 billion, a 13.5 percent increase over 2025. The driver: AI infrastructure. Data center spending is growing to €788 billion (+55.8 percent), with servers alone increasing by +36.9 percent. For CIOs, this does not mean more budget, but a shift of around 40 percent of their existing IT resources within twelve months, as 71 percent report that their AI budget will be cut or frozen by mid-2026 if no results are delivered.

07.05.2026

Key Takeaways

Gartner Forecast 22.04.2026: Global IT spending +13.5 percent to €6.310 billion, data center +55.8 percent to €788 billion, AI infrastructure share +€401 billion YoY. This is the largest shift since 2008.
Budgets grow slower than AI demands: Corporate CIOs in DACH receive budget increases between 4 and 9 percent, but must shift 30 to 40 percent of their existing IT resources. The leverage lies in legacy licenses, custom maintenance, and compliance redundancies.
Performance window closes in summer: 71 percent of CIOs say their AI budget will be cut or frozen by mid-2026 if no measurable outcomes are delivered, according to Info-Tech 2026 Q1. Those who delay ROI proof will lose their mandate.
C-Level Levers: Legacy sunset list with dates, cost-avoidance reporting at the quarterly level, board-visible token cost curve. Three points that fit into any audit report.

What the Gartner figures mean for DACH CIOs

What is the AI Infrastructure Budget 2026? The AI infrastructure budget refers to the funds a CIO allocates for servers, data center capacity, GPU clusters, inference hardware, and AI-centric software to run productive model workloads. Gartner estimates the global increase from 2025 to 2026 at an additional 401 billion US dollars in spending, making AI infrastructure the largest single growth category in the IT budget.

Gartner has revised its forecast for global IT spending in 2026, raising it from 9.8 percent to 13.5 percent on April 22, 2026. This amounts to 6.310 trillion US dollars and represents a historic leap in data center spending. The drivers are AI infrastructure investments by hyperscalers and server purchases for training and inference.

The Gartner Newsroom press release is the fifth update in twelve months and the most significant. John David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst, sees the movement as two-fold: hyperscalers build capacity, enterprises follow with their own workloads twelve to 18 months later. For DACH CIOs, this means that vendor roadmaps for 2026 are already factoring in shortages, but their own board mandates are often still framed in 2025 logic.

Three figures from the study are relevant for board discussions. First, the 55.8 percent increase in data center spending. Second, the 36.9 percent increase in server spending. Third, the less visible projected 16.9 percent increase in software spending, driven by AI-centric modules in existing ERP and collaboration suites. CIOs who only shift funds into hardware will miss out on software levers and thus most of the user-side value creation.

Where the 40 percent realistically needs to come from

The intriguing question is not how much needs to be shifted, but from which pots. In DACH corporations, whose CIOs are currently preparing their 2026 mid-year review, four sources are emerging.

First, legacy licenses without a roadmap. Maintenance for applications that have been in sunset discussions for three years but are renewed annually because no one has calculated the migration case. In typical DAX companies, 8 to 14 percent of the IT budget falls into this category. Second, custom maintenance contracts that have grown historically and have not been re-tendered in two years. Third, compliance dual paths from the pre-DORA era, which can be dissolved after the data strategy consolidation. Fourth, and this is where it gets political, hardware refresh cycles for end devices that can run longer under cloud-first strategies without generating risks.

What is not a saving potential: Cybersecurity budget under NIS2 and DORA obligations, compliance reporting for ESG reporting, and license costs for user-based SaaS applications with high adoption. Cutting here imports audit risks that become much more expensive in board discussions than the original savings.

+ 401 Mrd. $

Pure AI infrastructure delta between 2025 and 2026 according to Gartner forecast from April 22, 2026. Server and data center spending thus grow twice as fast as the overall IT budget.

Source: Gartner Newsroom, April 22, 2026

Three Points to Include in Every Executive Board Meeting Starting Q3

As a CIO preparing the next budget request this summer, you should explicitly address three points instead of leaving them up for discussion. First, a written sunset list for legacy applications, including the date, responsible person, and freed-up budget per quarter. Second, cost-avoidance reporting in the same format used for cybersecurity investments, presented as avoided damage rather than an efficiency statement. Third, a board-ready token cost curve showing how AI inference costs per use case are developing and where the NVIDIA Vera Rubin generation is expected to reduce unit costs to one-tenth by 2027.

A final, honest observation. The interesting decisions in this shift are not those in the quarterly report, but those made in the third week of the mid-year review that go unnoticed. A CIO who sticks to the sunset list and doesn’t extend it gains leeway that won’t be available in 2027. Avoiding the ownership question will lead to a political discussion with the CFO in the fall, which will be much costlier than the migration itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the 40 percent reallocation a Gartner value or an industry estimate?

A mix. Gartner provides the global growth figures per IT segment for 2026 and names $401 billion as the pure AI infrastructure delta. The 30 to 40 percent reallocation in a typical DAX or MDAX budget results from the difference between budget increases (4 to 9 percent) and the required investment for AI initiatives that the board and CIO have classified as critical. This order of magnitude is also visible in Info-Tech CIO Priorities 2026 and the Logicalis CIO study 2026.

Which budgets can realistically be shifted in the current fiscal year?

In fiscal year 2026, legacy licenses and custom maintenance contracts can usually only be partially shifted due to notice periods and remaining terms. A realistic reallocation is 8 to 12 percent in the current year, with an additional 15 to 20 percent in the following year, if sunset decisions are now documented in writing. Anyone promising more in 2026 is putting their mandate at risk.

How does this fit with the DORA and NIS2 compliance wave?

Cybersecurity and compliance budgets remain outside the reallocation discussion. However, AI investments are changing the compliance architecture because prompt DLP, agent inventory, and AI model governance trigger new obligations. Those who resolve duplicate tooling paths from the pre-DORA era can free up funds in the single-digit percentage range without lowering the audit level.

About the Author

Angelika Beierlein is COO at Evernine. She comes from leadership roles across media and tech-adjacent industries and regularly writes about operations and boardroom topics where structures matter more than slogans. She believes honest retrospectives are more expensive than three offsites but are the only measure that really changes things.