Shared Cloud Infrastructure Spending Continues Leading Growth Path Fueled by Investments on AI and HPC Related Projects in the Third Quarter of 2024.

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 115.3% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2024 (3Q24) to $57.3 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment with the latter growing by 28.6% in 3Q24 to $19.6 billion. The cloud infrastructure segment experienced a lower growth in unit demand of 15.6%, due to a continued increase in ASPs mostly related to the exponential increase of GPU server shipments.

Spending on shared cloud infrastructure reached $47.9 billion in the quarter, increasing 136.5% 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 3Q24 shared cloud accounted for 62.4% of the total infrastructure spending. The dedicated cloud infrastructure segment presented lower growth of 47.6% year-over-year in 3Q24 to $9.3 billion.

For 2024, IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 74.3% compared to 2023 to $192.0 billion. Non-cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 17.9% to $71.4 billion. Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 88.9% year over year to $157.8 billion for the full year, spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure is also expected to have a double-digit growth in 2024 with 28.6% to $34.2 billion for the full year. The subdued growth forecast for non-cloud infrastructure at 17.9% in 2024 reflects that even though most of the growth will come from cloud spending, general non-cloud dedicated systems are consolidating the recovery this year.

Based on idc.com story by Juan Seminara, Lidice Fernandez, JANUARY 17, 2025