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Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure reached a record $86 billion in Q3 2025, marking a sustained investment cycle as platform providers scale capacity for training and inference workloads, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Tracker.
The record performance in Q3 2025 signals a shift from initial pilot phases into a multi-year expansion, with full-year 2025 spending projected to reach $334 billion and more than $902 billion by 2029. Growth is expected to remain above 30% annually through 2027, before moderating into the mid-20% range in the latter years of the forecast.
The results highlight the central role of accelerated compute as enterprises and cloud providers move to support increasingly complex AI workloads.
Why AI Infrastructure Grew in Q3 2025
- Growth in Q3 was driven by massive capital investment from AI platform providers and hyperscalers, with hardware categories expanding to meet the rigorous data demands of large language models (LLMs).
- Servers dominated the market, accounting for $84.0 billion (nearly 98%) of total AI-centric spending.
- Cloud and Shared Deployments represented over 86% of the market, reflecting the industry’s reliance on scalable infrastructure.
- AI-Centric Storage reached $1.76 billion, driven by the need for high-performance repositories for model training and inference checkpoints.
Accelerated Compute and GPU Demand Accelerate Growth
Accelerated servers remain the foundation of AI infrastructure. While YoY growth moderated from earlier peaks in 2025, spending levels remained elevated, signaling sustained demand rather than a pullback in investment. Both x86 and non-x86 systems saw strong adoption as AI platforms scaled infrastructure to meet rising training and inference requirements.
Regional Growth Led by the United States and China
Geography played a major role in the Q3 surge, with two regions leading the global investment landscape:
- The United States is expected to remain the largest AI infrastructure market in 2025, accounting for approximately 76% of global spending with investment projected to grow from $254 billion in 2025 to nearly $708 billion by 2029. Growth is driven by hyperscalers and AI platform leaders expanding large-scale data center capacity.
- China (PRC) is expected to be the second fastest-growing major region over the forecast period, with spending projected to increase from $39.1 billion in 2025 to more than $139 billion by 2029, supported by continued investment in domestic AI platforms and sovereign AI initiatives.
IDC Analyst Commentary
“The AI infrastructure market has clearly moved beyond an initial deployment phase into a sustained expansion cycle,” said Lidice Fernandez, group vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers at IDC. “Public investment signals from leading AI platform providers point to multi-year commitments to infrastructure expansion, particularly around accelerated compute. These investments reflect long-term confidence in the growth of AI workloads across consumer, enterprise, and research use cases.”
