Building AI factories at enterprise scale

AI has become a juggernaut, driving technical strategy in the tech sector and outside of it. With the worldwide server market growing 30 percent in a single year to hit $122.6bn in the first quarter of 2025, IDC now feels safe recategorizing AI-driven investment "from cyclical to durable".

The analyst company expects inference to account for over 70 percent of computing demand by next year, adding that it's growing fastest at the edge.

All this investment in AI infrastructure might once have come mainly for hyperscalers, but that's changing quickly. Adoption is spreading quickly beyond public cloud service providers into enterprise environments, IDC adds. They're eager to run agentic AI in-house.

There are plenty of reasons for companies to own their own AI infrastructure rather than offloading it to the cloud. One of these is data control, especially in regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector that have sovereign data requirements. …