IDC: Shared Cloud Infrastructure Continues to Lead Infrastructure Spending in Q2

Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 61.5% year over year in the second quarter of 2024 (2Q24) to $42.9 billion, according to a recent report by IDC. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment with the latter growing by 41.4% in 2Q24 to $19.4 billion. The cloud infrastructure segment experienced lower growth in unit demand at 17.7%, due to a continued increase in average selling prices (ASPs), mostly related to the exponential increase of GPU server shipments.

“Cloud infrastructure spending growth continues to be driven by accelerated AI-related investments, which especially impacted servers but also triggered enterprise storage spending,” said Juan Pablo Seminara, research director, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers. “Different surveys conducted by IDC in 2024 show how AI investment plans have been scaling up and driving investment priorities for almost every region. Hyperscalers, Digital Service Providers, and major Cloud Service Providers are the ones that keep pushing the growth and that will continue to have a positive impact on the market during 2024 and 2025.”

Spending on shared cloud infrastructure reached $35.3 billion in the quarter, increasing 74.9% compared to a year ago. The shared cloud infrastructure category captures the largest share of spending compared to dedicated deployments and non-cloud spending, with shared cloud accounting for 56.6% of the total infrastructure spending in 2Q24. The dedicated cloud infrastructure segment presented lower growth of 19.2% year over year in 2Q24 to $7.6 billion.

For 2024, IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 48.8% compared to 2023 to $164.0 billion. Non-cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 11.7% to $67.5 billion. Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 57.9% year over year to $131.9 billion for the full year. Spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure is also expected to have double-digit growth in 2024 at 20.4% reaching $32.1 billion for the full year. The subdued growth forecast for non-cloud infrastructure at 11.7% in 2024 reflects that even though most of the growth will come from cloud spending, general non-cloud dedicated systems are consolidating their recovery this year.

IDC customers can find more details in the report entitled, “Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment.”

Channel Impact^®
The numbers reflect the continued impact of artificial intelligence on business opportunities in the tech industry.