IDC predicts AI infrastructure spending to reach $497 billion by 2026, with Arm racks becoming the mainstream

According to IDC data, AI infrastructure spending reached $89.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with rack level GPU servers based on Arm architecture replacing x86 processors as the mainstream acceleration computing platform. IDC has raised its forecast for AI infrastructure spending for the full year of 2026 to $497 billion, a year-on-year increase of nearly 56%. The global AI infrastructure market is expected to reach $1.08 trillion by 2029 and climb to $1.21 trillion by 2030, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of approximately 30% starting from 2025.