Infrastructure Leasing: Global Spending on AI-Optimized IaaS to Reach $42B

Businesses are abandoning hardware purchases in favor of flexible leasing. On August 10, 2026, research firm Gartner released a report projecting a 96% growth in global spending on AI-optimized IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)—reaching $42 billion by the end of 2026.

These figures record an important macroeconomic shift. Corporations have realized that buying their own tensor processors and building local server rooms is unprofitable due to rapid equipment obsolescence. The enterprise sector is migrating en masse to the clouds of hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), renting compute clusters via subscription for LLM inference. The staggering 96% growth proves that AI implementation has definitively moved from R&D labs into the operational B2B loop. Companies are willing to pay tens of billions of dollars for cloud infrastructure to integrate autonomous agents into their daily business processes.

Source: Gartner