Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments increased 18.5% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2023 to $31.8 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment.
Positive spending outlook
Juan Pablo Seminara, research director of Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers at IDC, observed the continuous acceleration of cloud infrastructure spending fueled by AI-related investments.
"Even though some caution remains on the socio-political side, the improvement in economic prospects contribute to a very positive spending outlook for 2024 and 2025 where cloud-based spending is expected to rebound at double-digit growth rates," he said.
Largest spending share
Shared cloud infrastructure spending reached $22.8 billion in the quarter, logging a 27% increase compared to the same time last year and capturing the largest spending share compared to dedicated deployments and non-cloud spending.
IDC projects cloud infrastructure spending to grow 19.3% in 2024 compared to 2023 to $129.9 billion due to new and existing mission-critical workloads requiring higher-end systems.
Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China) topped the list of the regions with increased spending in the fourth quarter of 2023 at 48.2% year over year, largely attributed to large high-performance computing and AI-related initiatives.
