According to International Data Corporation’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on computer and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure, including dedicated and shared environments, increased 12.5% year over year in Q1/21 to $15.1 billion. Investments in non-cloud infrastructure increased 6.3% year over year in Q1/21 to $13.5 billion.

Spending on shared cloud infrastructure increased 11.6% year over year in Q1/21, reaching $10.3 billion. IDC expects shared cloud infrastructure spending to surpass non-cloud infrastructure spending in the near future. Spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure increased 14.7% year over year in Q1/21 to $4.8 billion, with 45.5% of this amount deployed on customer premises. IDC expects that cloud environments will continue to outpace non-cloud environments throughout the forecast period.

With healthy first quarter results and the overall infrastructure market beginning to recover from the pandemic, IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 12.9% to $74.6 billion in 2021, while non-cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 2.7% to $58.5 billion after two years of declines. Shared cloud infrastructure is expected to grow by 12.2% year over year to $51.8 billion for the full year. Spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 14.7% to $22.7 billion for the full year.

As part of the new Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, IDC tracked various categories of service providers and how much compute and storage infrastructure these service providers purchase, including both cloud and non-cloud infrastructure. The service provider categories IDC follows are cloud service providers, digital service providers, communications service providers and managed service providers. In Q1/21, service providers as a group spent $15.5 billion on compute and storage infrastructure, growing 12.5% year over year and accounting for 54% of total compute and storage infrastructure spending. IDC expects compute and storage spending by service providers to reach $74.7 billion in 2021, growing 11.1% year over year.

Spending on cloud infrastructure increased across most regions in Q1/21, with the highest annual growth rates in Canada (40.3%), China (35%) and the Asia/Pacific region excluding Japan and China (28.8%). Western Europe grew 10.8%, the United States grew 4.5% and Japan declined 1.1%. The remaining regions had mixed results and collectively grew 0.1%.

At the vendor level, all major vendors grew their cloud infrastructure revenue in Q1/21, with the highest growth rates belonging to Lenovo (38.2%) and Huawei (37.9%). Huawei, Lenovo and HPE/H3C each grew their market share compared with results from the prior year’s first quarter.

* IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide cloud IT infrastructure market when there is a difference of 1% or less in vendor revenue shares among two or more vendors.