Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 115.3% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2024 (3Q24) to $57.3 billion, according to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment revealed thatspending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment, with the latter growing by 28.6% in 3Q24 to $19.6 billion.
AI and HPC-related investments
"Cloud infrastructure spending growth continues being driven by accelerated servers-related investments that not only aim to cover AI initiatives but also support large HPC projects that were unveiled recently," said Juan Pablo Seminara, director for IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.
"After a year where the demand was focused on serve infrastructure build-up for AI model development and training, we will start to see more investments oriented to AI model inferencing that will shift demand towards less dense GPU-based platforms, that, of course, will continue to be demanded throughout 2025 and beyond but with a less aggressive pace than last year," Seminara said.
Shared cloud infrastructure
Spending on shared cloud infrastructure reached $47.9 billion in the quarter, an increase of 136.5% compared to a year ago.
The shared cloud infrastructure category continues to capture the largest share of spending compared to dedicated deployments and non-cloud spending. In 3Q24, it accounted for 62.4% of the total infrastructure spending.
Geographically, APeJC and Japan showed double-digit growth in year-over-year spending on cloud infrastructure in 3Q24, with 90.3% and 73.5%, respectively.
