IDC raises 2029 forecast for OCP-recognized hardware spend 2.7x to $800 billion

A forecast revised upward by about 2.7 times

The OCP Foundation announced the results of IDC's 2026 Market Impact Study on October 13, 2026. The study projects annual spending of about $800 billion in 2029 on OCP-recognized IT equipment. The previous edition had forecast $295 billion for that year, an increase of about 2.7 times.

For 2030, the new forecast reaches $892 billion. By then, OCP-recognized equipment is expected to account for about 51% of all spending in the infrastructure categories covered by the study. IDC expects spending to grow from about $154 billion in 2025 to $892 billion in 2030, a compound annual growth rate of about 42%.

The study is commissioned by the OCP Foundation each year to assess the market impact of OCP-recognized equipment. According to the Foundation, this year's results reflect both the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure investment and broader adoption of OCP designs.

Servers and AI lead the spending

Servers are the largest spending category, with GPU-accelerated systems the main driver of growth. Of the $892 billion forecast for 2030, about $814 billion is in servers. IDC also expects continued growth in switching equipment, rack infrastructure, power and cooling as organizations build out systems for increasingly demanding workloads.

The key findings listed in the announcement are:

• About $800 billion in annual spending in 2029, roughly 2.7 times the previous forecast for that year.
• $892 billion in annual spending in 2030, including about $814 billion in servers.
• About 51% of spending in the measured infrastructure categories going to OCP-recognized infrastructure by 2030.
• About $628 billion of AI-related spending on OCP-recognized infrastructure in 2030, around 70% of the projected total.

IDC also points to the growing ecosystem of solution providers and the availability of openly shared designs as factors favoring adoption. The announcement adds that the use of OCP-recognized equipment extends well beyond the Foundation's formal members, to organizations around the world that access and implement these designs.

The study covers servers, external storage, switches, compute racks, power, cooling, carrier equipment and peripherals. Figures represent annual spending, and percentages are rounded.

OCP's technical agenda and what it signals

"AI is transforming the industry's infrastructure needs, and these results show the growing role of open designs in meeting that demand," said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., chief innovation officer at the OCP Foundation. He added that the community brings companies together to tackle challenges across the data center, from semiconductors and servers to cooling, power and the electrical grid.

Over the past year, the OCP community has advanced higher-power racks, liquid cooling, Ethernet-based AI networking and open chiplet specifications. Its work also covers direct-current power distribution, energy storage and coordination between data centers and the power grid.

The Foundation's strategic initiative, Open Data Center for AI, focuses these efforts on power, cooling and facility management. The OCP Energy project extends collaboration to power generation and storage, while the AI Computing Continuum project supports deployment beyond hyperscale data centers, in enterprise, regional and edge environments. Going forward, OCP says it will focus on supporting diverse AI chips, coordinating design at data center scale and developing open modules that organizations can deploy in a wider range of environments.

For the market, the study suggests that open hardware designs are expected to take a rising share of AI infrastructure budgets. The forecast comes from a study commissioned by the OCP Foundation itself, so the figures reflect IDC's projections as presented by the organization.