New Delhi, June 1 (IANS) End‑user spending on public cloud services in India is expected to grow 28.1 per cent to total $17.5 billion in 2026, up from $13.7 billion in 2025, a report said on Monday.

The report from business and technology insights company Gartner said strong enterprise demand for AI‑ready cloud infrastructure is redefining cloud investment priorities.

“This is further fueled by rising demand for application modernization, digital sovereignty, digital service delivery and more scalable, consumption-based IT models, as organizations move toward more advanced and strategic cloud use cases,” said Ashish Banerjee, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.

The report forecasted infrastructure‑as‑a‑service and platform‑as‑a‑service expected to be the fastest‑growing segments at 40 per cent and 25.4 per cent growth respectively during the year.

“Cloud adoption is becoming more tightly aligned with business goals, such as improving productivity, accelerating innovation and go-to-market speed, enhancing customer experience and strengthening business resilience,” said Banerjee.

“This sharper focus on business outcomes is sustaining strong momentum in cloud investments across the country,” he added.

Rising needs for GPUs, high‑performance compute, high‑speed networking and scalable storage are amplifying IaaS adoption and higher spending in that segment.

SaaS growth will be more moderate as enterprises optimise licences, rationalise usage and shift incremental spending toward infrastructure and platform capabilities required to scale AI workloads.

“Organisations are accelerating adoption of AI-driven technologies to unify data, connect systems, speed up development and enable real-time digital interactions, driving PaaS growth beyond cloud migration toward platform-led execution,” said Arunasree Cheparthi, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.

Governance of increasingly complex hybrid, multicloud and AI-enabled environments emerges as a significant cloud challenge for enterprises in 2026, the report noted.

Over 60 per cent of enterprises will perform intensive AI model activity by 2030, in one cloud but leverage it with their data in another, up from less than 10 per cent today.

—IANS

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