NEEDHAM, Mass., March 27, 2025 – According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 99.3% 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% in 4Q24 to $22.0 billion. The cloud infrastructure segment experienced double digit growth unit demand of 33.5%, with a continued increase in ASPs mostly related to the accelerated increase of GPU server shipments.
“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% CAGR for the following five years.”
Spending on shared cloud infrastructure reached $57.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024, increasing 124.4% compared to a year ago. The shared cloud infrastructure category continues capturing the largest share of spending compared to dedicated deployments and non-cloud spending, in 4Q24 shared cloud accounted for 64.0% of the total infrastructure spending. The dedicated cloud infrastructure segment grew 21.8% year-over-year in 4Q24 to $10.0 billion.
For 2025, IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 33.3% compared to 2024 to $271.5 billion. Non-cloud infrastructure is expected to decline -4.9% to $68.1 billion. Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 25.7% 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% to $57.8 billion for the full year. Additionally, the cloud infrastructure GPU based accelerated market will show a 46.8% 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.
IDC’s service provider category includes cloud service providers, digital service providers, communications service providers, hyperscaler, and managed service providers. In 4Q24, service providers as a group spent $65.6 billion on compute and storage infrastructure, up 103.9% from the prior year. This spending accounted for 73.8% of the total market. Non-service providers (e.g., enterprises, government, etc.) also increased their spending to $23.3 billion growing 23.5% year over year. IDC expects compute and storage spending by service providers to reach $262.1 billion in 2025, growing at 30.9% year-over-year.
On a geographic basis, year-over-year spending on cloud infrastructure in 4Q24 showed very positive results across all regions where the fastest growing regions were Canada and USA showing triple digit growth of 151.8% and 125.3% respectively, regions with double digit growth were China, Japan, APeJC, Western Europe, Middle East & Africa and Latin America with 99.6%, 76.2%, 48.0%, 36.8%, 28.1% and 14.3% respectively. While Central & Eastern Europe was the only region showing one digit growth at 5.6%.
Long term, IDC predicts spending on cloud infrastructure to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.8% over the 2024-2029 forecast period, reaching $461.9 billion in 2029 and accounting for 83.0% of total compute and storage infrastructure spend. Shared cloud infrastructure spending will account for 80.5% of the total cloud spending in 2029, growing at a 16.9% CAGR and reaching $371.7 billion. Spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure will grow at a CAGR of 21.8% to $90.3 billion by 2029. Spending on non-cloud infrastructure will also rebound with a 5.7% CAGR, reaching $94.4 billion in 2029. Spending by service providers on compute and storage infrastructure is expected to grow at a 17.5% CAGR, reaching $448.0 billion in 2029.
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment is designed to provide clients with a better understanding of what portion of the compute and storage hardware markets are being deployed in cloud environments. The Tracker breaks out each vendors’ revenue into shared and dedicated cloud environments for historical data and provides a five-year forecast. This Tracker is part of the Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, which provides a holistic total addressable market view of the four key enabling infrastructure technologies for the datacenter (servers, external enterprise storage systems, and purpose-built appliances: HCI and PBBA).
Taxonomy Notes
IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service.
Shared cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise. The shared cloud market includes a variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters; these services in total are called public cloud services. The shared cloud market also includes digital services such as media/content distribution, sharing and search, social media, and e-commerce.
Dedicated cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff. In dedicated cloud that is managed by in-house staff, “vendors (cloud service providers)” are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups. In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the “service users.”
For more information about IDC’s Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer & Cloud Deployment, please contact Lidice Fernandez at lfernandez@idc.com or Juan Pablo Seminara at jseminara@idc.com.
About IDC Trackers
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International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology, IT benchmarking and sourcing, and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC’s analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights.
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