Spending on compute and storage infrastructure for cloud deployments grew 18.5% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to the latest update to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, which was issued last week. The total number of units shipped declined, however, which reflects hyperscalers’ appetite for high-capacity, GPU-heavy servers with higher average selling prices.
AI is behind the steep rise in cloud infrastructure spending, according to Lidice Fernandez, a group vice president at IDC and one of the co-authors of the report. More particularly, it’s the rapid build-out of AI capability by some of the biggest companies in the technology sector, including major hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft, coupled with the fact that the hardware needed to cope with AI-centric workloads involves expensive GPU hardware.
