Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments increased 36.9 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2024 to $33 billion, according to IDC.
The analyst house found that spending on cloud infrastructure outgrew the non-cloud segment during the period, with the latter only increasing by 5.7 percent to $13.9bn during the quarter.
The figures were published as part of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, which provides an overview of what it calls the “four key enabling infrastructure technologies for the data center.” These include servers, external enterprise storage systems, and purpose-built appliances.
Service providers, a group that includes cloud service providers, digital service providers, communications service providers, hyperscalers, and managed service providers, spent $32.2 billion on compute and storage infrastructure in Q1 2024, accounting for 68.7 percent of the total market. By comparison, non-service providers, such as enterprises and governments, spent $14.7 billion during the same period.
Spending on public cloud infrastructure saw the biggest increase year over year, up 43.9 percent to $26.3bn, while private cloud spending only grew by 15.3 percent during the same period, totaling $6.7bn. Furthermore, public cloud infrastructure also accounted for 56.1 percent of total infrastructure spending during the quarter.
As a result of this growth, IDC is forecasting that total cloud infrastructure spending will reach $138.3bn in 2024, up 26.1 percent from 2023, of which $108.3bn is expected to come from spending on public cloud infrastructure.
Non-cloud infrastructure spending is only expected to grow 8.4 percent during the period, totaling $64.8bn.
When segmenting the data by geography, IDC found that every region apart from Latin America saw a year-over-year spending increase. Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa reported 4 percent and 5.3 percent growth respectively, while Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China), Japan, Central and Eastern Europe, USA, China (PRC), and Canada all experienced double-digit growth. Year over year, these figures sit at 85.4 percent, 53.1 percent, 42.6 percent, 37.0 percent, 33.7 percent, and 16.1 percent year over year, respectively.
Additionally, "Cloud infrastructure spending growth continues being driven by the explosion of AI-related investments, which not only impact servers but also started to have a positive influence on enterprise storage as well," said Juan Pablo Seminara, research director for IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker.
"Even though some caution still remains on the socio-political side, it has become clear that AI investment plans are not slowing down in 2024 and will continue growing at a high rate this year and beyond. Additionally, the improvement on economic prospects contributes to a very positive spending outlook for 2024 and 2025 where cloud-based spending will increase at double-digit pace."
