Global cloud infrastructure spending to grow 33.3 pc in 2025
The global cloud infrastructure spending is set to grow 33.3 per cent in 2025 to $271.5 billion compared to 2024, according to a new report.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 99.3 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2024 (4Q24) to $67.0 billion.
Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment with the latter growing by 25.8 per cent in 4Q24 to $22.0 billion.
The cloud infrastructure segment experienced double digit growth unit demand of 33.5 per cent, with a continued increase in average selling prices (ASPs) mostly related to the accelerated increase of GPU server shipments.
According to the IDC report, non-cloud infrastructure is expected to decline -4.9 per cent to $68.1 billion. Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 25.7 per cent year over year to $213.7 billion for the full year, spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure expected to grow further in 2025 with 71.8 per cent to $57.8 billion for the full year.
Additionally, the cloud infrastructure GPU based accelerated market will show a 46.8 per cent growth in 2025, reaching $157.8 billion value as AI infrastructure investments still count with an important backlog as well as future projects in the cloud.
“Cloud infrastructure spending growth continued outpacing market expectations again in the fourth quarter,” said Juan Pablo Seminara, director for IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.
Even after raising some doubts about the necessity of large investments in AI infrastructure exposed by DeepSeek’s R1 initial impact that later proven been not that accurate, the industry is also understanding that the evolution from simple chatbots to reasoning models to agentic AI will require several orders of magnitude more processing capacity, especially for inferencing.
“So even by gaining efficiency on investments costs, IDC expects cloud infrastructure market growth of 17.8 per cent CAGR for the following five years,” he mentioned.
