Europe's IT spend to surge 11% as cloud sovereignty fever takes hold (www.theregister.com)

Gartner forecasts European IT spending will rise roughly 11% next year to about $1.4 trillion, building on an 11.6% increase that brought 2025 to roughly $1.3 trillion. The jump is being driven by heavy investment in generative AI (GenAI) — model spending is expected to grow about 78% next year — plus cloud, cybersecurity and datacenter builds. Datacenter spending is set to surge 38.2% in 2025 to $83.6 billion and then reach $99.3 billion as growth moderates to 18.8% the following year. Meanwhile, PC and server spending remain broadly flat while software prices rise as vendors increasingly bundle AI capabilities. The underlying story is geopolitical: a wave of “cloud sovereignty” or geo-repatriation is reshaping procurement. In Gartner’s Western Europe CIO survey, 61% said they plan to increase use of local cloud providers and 53% expect geopolitics to constrain reliance on global players. That matters for AI/ML infrastructure and operations — large-scale AI compute investment is still concentrated in North America, so Europe’s push for local clouds and datacenters could fragment the market, shift compliance/security architectures, and raise costs for AI deployment and software licensing. For engineers and architects, the practical implications are clearer regional data governance, more local partnerships for compute, and potentially higher bills for AI-enabled software.