AI spending · 2026 forecast
$2.67T of AI spending
One year of AI spending.
Bigger than almost everything on Earth.
Gartner expects the world to spend $2.67 trillion on AI in 2026 — more than it spends on alcohol, tourism or clean energy, and close to what the world spends on defence. This page puts that number next to the other lines it can be measured against.
- $1.79T2025 forecast
- +49.5%growth into 2026
- #2 of 18rank by scale
The scale
One table. Every other line.
Annual global spending in US dollars. The AI figure is the 2026 forecast; every other line is a published estimate for its own year, and forecasts are labeled.
Definitions differ between sources — marketing revenue, receipts, tax take and investment are not the same measure. Compare scale, not accounting.
Above the chart
And the bigger lines above it.
Three lines that stay bigger than AI spending even in 2026 — the context the table above leaves out.
Pick two
Make your own comparison.
Any two lines from the table. The AI number follows the year you pick above; every other line is a single published estimate.
Ratios are scale comparisons between published estimates, not like-for-like accounting.
The same $2.67T
Point it somewhere else.
The same money, expressed in years of the investment the world is short of.
These are additional annual investments, not existing budgets. Receipts.
AI has spent, since you opened this page
$0
At the 2026 forecast average, that is $84,700 every second.
A modeled average, not a live ledger. Real spending arrives in lumps: servers, contracts, chips, buildings.
Receipts
Every number has a source.
Annual, global, current USD. Forecasts and estimates are labeled. Definitions vary between sources, so compare scale rather than accounting.
| Line item | Figure | Source |
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