IT Spending Will Exceed $6 Trillion for the First Time in 2026 Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here's How to Invest.

Gartner forecasts that global information technology (IT) spending will hit $6.15 trillion this year, up 10.8% over 2025 levels.

Many of the top tech companies in the world have announced massive increases in their capital expenditure (capex) for 2026 to pay for data center infrastructure.

Amazon announced it planned to spend $200 billion in 2026, $50 billion more than analysts anticipated. Alphabet, Google's parent company, anticipates its capex to double this year.

The infrastructure these and many other companies need to achieve their artificial intelligence (AI) goals is not cheap.

The following two companies ought to be two of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI spending spree set to happen this year.

Image source: Getty Images

King of the hill

It should come as no surprise that Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is set to profit from a massive boost in IT spending.

According to IOT Analytics, Nvidia controls 92% of the data center graphics processing unit (GPU) market. Its next-largest competitor is Advanced Micro Devices, which controls 4% of the market.

While anything in business is subject to change, right now and for the foreseeable future, Nvidia is the GPU kingpin and all the big AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more need Nvidia's hardware.

Even Alphabet still needs Nvidia hardware, despite its competing tensor processing unit (TPU) that Google Gemini is optimized for.

Nvidia's GPUs are so powerful and so critical to AI that they have become the subject of diplomatic negotiations between global superpowers like the U.S. and China.

It's the Nvidia Blackwell chip in particular that has become a major sticking point in relations between the two countries. The U.S. banned the export of the chip to China but there are indicators that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI start-up, trained its latest model on Nvidia hardware despite that ban.

Whether the report is true and how China got hold of Blackwell hardware is anyone's guess, but it highlights how in-demand Nvidia's products are.

Though, Nvidia's bottom line was already doing a good job showing that.

Per the company's Q4 and full fiscal 2026 results (reported February 25, 2026), Nvidia saw its full-year revenue total a record $215.9 billion, up 65% over its fiscal 2025.

For the quarter, data center revenue came in at $62.3 billion, up 22% over Q3 2026 and 75% over Q4 2025. It also made up the bulk of the $68.1 billion in revenue Nvidia brought in for the quarter.

To top it off, Nvidia runs a net profit margin of 55.6% and has a healthy balance sheet with a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07.

With numbers like that, I don't see Nvidia's reign coming to an end anytime soon.

Cyberspace for rent

While new data centers are springing up incredibly fast, not every company has Amazon or Alphabet money to build their own, nor does every company need an entire data center.

That's precisely why Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX) exists. It's a data center real estate investment trust (REIT) that rents space in its 280 data centers in 36 countries around the world to over 10,500 companies, including 310 of the Fortune 500.

And it's the rent Equinix collects that provides the bulk of its revenue. But the company can also facilitate a direct connection between one of its tenants and any of the major cloud networks.

Equinix partners with Microsoft Azure, Amazon's AWS, Google's Cloud, and more. And Equinix's data centers have access to direct hardware connections to all of those clouds.

Using either a physical or virtual connection, any of Equinix's tenants can get a private connection with the network of their choice, offering a faster and more secure way to use cloud infrastructure.

It's a pretty lucrative deal for both Equinix and its investors. As a REIT, Equinix must pay out 90% of its taxable income as a dividend to its shareholders. At present, that dividend yields 2% and the company has increased it for 11 years running.

From 2024 to 2025, it raised the dividend 10% and it's planning to do the same thing in 2026. It's not a particularly tall order as the company's adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) grew 12% year over year in 2025 on the back of 5% revenue growth for the year.

While Nvidia could help you profit from all the companies building their own data centers, Equinix allows you to profit from all those that can't.

Put the two together and you give your portfolio exposure to a good chunk of the $6 trillion in IT spending projected for this year.

James Hires has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Amazon, Equinix, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.