Cloud Spending by Industry 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Elena Rodriguez | Last updated: September 26, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Banking, software and information services, and retail will spend at least $250 billion on public cloud services in 2026, according to an Axis Intelligence Research calculation from IDC’s March 2026 forecast. Yet across 21 European sectors, the Axis Workload Depth Ratio (WDR™) shows a 3.6× gap between the industries running real workloads in the cloud and those still renting inboxes.
Quick Answer
Worldwide public cloud spending will pass $1 trillion in 2026, growing more than 21%, according to IDC. Banking, software and information services, and retail take 25% of it — at least $250 billion, by Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation. The eight largest industries hold more than half of all spend. Depth varies far more than spend: IT services score 64.5 on the Axis WDR™; construction scores 17.9.
Key Findings
- Banking, software and information services, and retail will account for at least $250 billion of 2026 public cloud spending, Axis Intelligence Research calculates from IDC’s March 2026 forecast.
- IDC’s eight largest cloud-buying industries together hold more than 50% of worldwide public cloud spending in 2026, according to Axis Intelligence Research’s sum of IDC’s published shares.
- EU computer programming and IT service firms score 64.5 on the Axis Workload Depth Ratio (WDR™), 3.6 times the 17.9 recorded by construction, based on Eurostat 2025 data.
- EU utilities score 40.1 on the WDR™, ahead of pharmaceuticals (36.1) and professional services (33.6), Axis Intelligence Research finds from Eurostat’s 2025 enterprise survey.
- 53.96% of EU manufacturers buy paid cloud, but manufacturing’s WDR™ is 21.2 — a 32.8-point gap between adoption and depth, per Axis Intelligence Research.
Which Industries Spend the Most on Cloud in 2026?
IDC’s Worldwide Software and Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, which tracks 28 industries across 53 countries, names the same three leaders it has named in recent editions: banking, software and information services, and retail. Together they take 25% of the global total, IDC reported on March 4, 2026.
The next five — professional and personal services, capital markets, media and entertainment, telecommunications, and healthcare providers — account for more than a quarter. IDC’s fastest-growing industries are capital markets, banking, and software and information services.
Cloud spending by industry: the 2026 ranking
| Rank | Industry | 2026 position | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | Banking; Software & Information Services; Retail | 25% of global spend combined (≥$250B, Axis calc.) | IDC, March 2026 |
| 4–8 | Professional & Personal Services; Capital Markets; Media & Entertainment; Telecommunications; Healthcare Providers | More than 25% combined | IDC, March 2026 |
| Fastest growth | Capital Markets; Banking; Software & Information Services | Fastest-growing industries | IDC, March 2026 |
| Fastest PaaS growth | Banking; Retail; Aerospace & Defense | Fastest-growing for PaaS | IDC, March 2026 |
How Axis Intelligence Research gets to $250 billion: IDC gives the total as “more than $1 trillion” and the top-three share as 25%. 25% × $1,000 billion = $250 billion, a floor rather than a point estimate — every input is a lower bound, so the true figure sits above it. The same logic gives the concentration figure: 25% (top three) + more than 25% (next five) = more than half of all public cloud spending sits in eight of IDC’s 28 industries.
Does cloud spending follow overall IT spending by industry?
Mostly, yes. In IDC’s separate 2026 ICT forecast, the three largest ICT buyers are the same trio — software and information services, banking, and retail — at more than $1 trillion combined out of $4 trillion. One reading note for anyone quoting that release: its bulleted summary says “>$1 trillion” while the body text says “over $1 billion.” The bullet is consistent with the $4 trillion total; the body text reads as a typo, and we use the trillion figure.
The divergence is in the second tier. Federal and central government ranks among IDC’s five next-largest ICT buyers but not among its eight largest cloud buyers. Capital markets makes the cloud top eight but not the ICT list. That gap is the whole story of regulated public-sector IT: big budgets, slow migration.
Elena Rodriguez: Concentration is the number procurement teams should sit with. When eight industries hold more than half of a trillion-dollar market, hyperscaler roadmaps, industry clouds and committed-spend discounts get designed around a bank’s workloads, not a construction firm’s. If you sit outside those eight, you are buying a product built for someone else’s consumption profile — and your leverage in the renewal is correspondingly thinner.
Which Industries Actually Run Workloads in the Cloud? The Workload Depth Ratio (WDR™)
Spending rankings measure dollars. They don’t tell you whether an industry has moved workloads or just moved email. A retailer paying for a SaaS inbox and a software firm running its production stack on rented compute both count as “cloud adopters.”
So Axis Intelligence Research built a metric for the difference.
Workload Depth Ratio (WDR™) — the average share of an industry’s cloud-buying enterprises that also buy the two infrastructure-grade layers: computing power to run their own software, and a hosted platform for developing, testing or deploying applications. Scale 0–100. A score of 100 would mean every cloud buyer in the sector rents both compute and a development platform; a score near 0 would mean cloud use stops at office software and storage.
Formula: WDR = (% buying cloud computing power + % buying cloud dev/deploy platform) ÷ (2 × % buying any paid cloud) × 100. Both layers are weighted equally (50/50). All inputs are percentages of enterprises with 10+ employees from Eurostat’s isoc_cicce_usen2 dataset (EU27, 2025 survey, data updated February 27, 2026).
Worked example (IT services): (52.03 + 57.99) ÷ (2 × 85.28) × 100 = 64.5.
Workload Depth Ratio by industry, EU 2025
| Industry (NACE) | Paid cloud use (% of firms) | Buy compute power (% of firms) | Buy dev platform (% of firms) | WDR™ | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Computer programming & IT services (J62–J63) | 85.28 | 52.03 | 57.99 | 64.5 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Information & communication (J) | 82.92 | 48.10 | 52.61 | 60.7 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Telecommunications (J61) | 69.61 | 32.71 | 36.23 | 49.5 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Scientific R&D (M72) | 76.30 | 33.01 | 32.47 | 42.9 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Electricity, gas & steam supply (D35) | 71.48 | 28.44 | 28.91 | 40.1 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Pharmaceuticals manufacturing (C21) | 81.17 | 29.06 | 29.47 | 36.1 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Computer & electronics manufacturing (C26) | 70.54 | 22.96 | 25.07 | 34.0 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Professional, scientific & technical (M) | 67.40 | 24.39 | 20.92 | 33.6 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Real estate (L68) | 61.61 | 19.61 | 19.96 | 32.1 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Wholesale & retail trade (G) | 51.34 | 15.07 | 14.08 | 28.4 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Motor vehicles & transport equipment (C29–C30) | 61.61 | 16.88 | 16.87 | 27.4 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Chemicals manufacturing (C20) | 67.29 | 18.41 | 18.33 | 27.3 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| All sectors excl. finance (EU total) | 52.74 | 14.86 | 13.76 | 27.1 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Retail trade (G47) | 43.08 | 12.18 | 10.98 | 26.9 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Administrative & support services (N) | 51.96 | 14.80 | 12.80 | 26.6 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Water supply & waste (E) | 59.03 | 12.00 | 15.76 | 23.5 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Transportation & storage (H) | 46.57 | 11.33 | 10.02 | 22.9 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Machinery manufacturing (C28) | 63.93 | 14.42 | 13.64 | 21.9 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Manufacturing (C) | 53.96 | 11.31 | 11.56 | 21.2 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Food, beverages & tobacco (C10–C12) | 40.88 | 7.93 | 8.24 | 19.8 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Accommodation & food services (I) | 39.52 | 8.58 | 6.53 | 19.1 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
| Construction (F) | 47.47 | 9.91 | 7.12 | 17.9 | Eurostat; Axis calc. |
Why utilities outrank pharma on cloud depth
The surprise in the table is electricity, gas and steam supply at 40.1 — above pharmaceuticals, electronics manufacturing and professional services. Eurostat also recorded the largest two-year adoption jump in the combined energy-and-water sector, +10.56 percentage points between 2023 and 2025, per its Statistics Explained article.
The water-and-waste half of that sector scores only 23.5. The depth sits with energy suppliers — grid operators and retailers running metering, forecasting and trading platforms. That is consistent with what Axis Intelligence Research tracks on the grid side in our smart grid statistics.
The manufacturing gap: adopted, but not migrated
53.96% of EU manufacturers buy paid cloud services — slightly above the all-sector 52.74%. But manufacturing’s WDR™ is 21.2, below the EU total of 27.1. Axis Intelligence Research measures the adoption-to-depth gap at 32.8 points (53.96 − 21.2), among the widest of any major sector.
Factory software is the reason. MES, SCADA and line-control systems sit on-site for latency and uptime reasons; the cloud contract covers email, ERP and file storage. Machinery makers (21.9) and food processors (19.8) show the same pattern.
Elena Rodriguez: A WDR of 21 in manufacturing is the most useful number on this page for anyone selling or budgeting cloud. It says the seats are bought and the consumption isn’t. The next leg of manufacturing cloud spend isn’t more licences — it’s compute and platform workloads, and that’s where a consumption bill behaves nothing like a per-seat bill. Model it that way before you sign the commit.
How Much Do Companies Spend on Cloud by Service Model?
SaaS is still the largest category. IDC says it accounts for more than half of 2026 public cloud spending, while PaaS is the fastest-growing model at over 37%, driven by AI platforms and application development software.
Gartner’s most recent public segment table — from its November 2024 forecast — gives the dollar split for 2025. [older data: Gartner has not published a free 2026 segment table; its 2026 forecast sits behind client access.]
Public cloud end-user spending by segment, 2024–2025
| Segment | 2024 ($M) | 2025 ($M) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS | 250,804 | 299,071 | Gartner, Nov 2024 |
| IaaS | 169,818 | 211,856 | Gartner, Nov 2024 |
| PaaS | 171,565 | 208,644 | Gartner, Nov 2024 |
| DaaS | 3,466 | 3,849 | Gartner, Nov 2024 |
| Total | 595,652 | 723,421 | Gartner, Nov 2024 |
Why Gartner’s $723 billion and IDC’s $1 trillion don’t contradict each other: they measure different perimeters, different years and different forecast vintages. Axis Intelligence Research does not average or splice them. Use IDC for industry splits (it is the only one of the two publishing them); use Gartner for segment dollars.
Do large companies buy deeper cloud than small ones?
Yes, sharply. Eurostat finds 84.67% of large EU enterprises buy paid cloud, against 66.78% of medium and 49.3% of small firms. Among cloud buyers, 52.86% of large enterprises buy PaaS versus 22.59% of small ones. The industry WDR™ scores partly reflect firm-size mix — which is exactly why retail, dominated by small shops, scores 26.9 even though retail is a top-three global spender in IDC’s ranking.
Where Is Cloud Spending Going by Region in 2026?
| Region | 2026 public cloud spending | Source |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $647 billion | IDC, March 2026 |
| Western Europe | $255 billion | IDC, March 2026 |
| Asia/Pacific (excl. Japan & China) | $84 billion | IDC, March 2026 |
The United States spends 2.5 times as much as Western Europe (647 ÷ 255, Axis Intelligence Research calculation). IDC expects five-year growth above 20% in the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, Asia/Pacific excluding Japan and China, Central and Eastern Europe, and Western Europe. Regional sovereignty rules shape European demand in particular — covered in our sovereign cloud statistics.
How Much Industry Cloud Spending Is Wasted?
Spend growth and spend quality are drifting apart. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report estimates 29% of IaaS and PaaS spend is wasted — the first increase in five years, attributed to AI workloads. Managing cloud spend remains the top challenge for 85% of organizations, and 76% of large enterprises now spend more than $5 million a month, Flexera reported on March 18, 2026.
The governance response is already visible. The FinOps Foundation’s State of FinOps 2026, drawn from 1,192 respondents representing more than $83 billion in annual cloud spend, finds 98% of practitioners now manage AI spend and 78% of FinOps teams report to the CTO or CIO. For the full waste picture, see our FinOps statistics.
Elena Rodriguez: Put the two datasets together and the pattern is uncomfortable. The industries with the deepest workloads — software, telecoms, energy — are also where consumption billing and AI inference hit hardest, so they carry the most exposure to that 29%. The high-WDR sectors don’t need more cloud; they need unit economics per workload.
Methodology
Collection. Axis Intelligence Research fetched every figure on this page from its primary publisher between September 25 and 26, 2026: IDC (two press releases, March 4 and February 24, 2026), Eurostat (the isoc_cicce_usen2 API extract for EU27, 2025, updated February 27, 2026; the Statistics Explained article; and the February 3, 2026 news release), Gartner (November 19, 2024 forecast release), Flexera (March 18, 2026 release) and the FinOps Foundation (State of FinOps 2026). No figure comes from a secondary compiler.
WDR™ formula. WDR = (E_CC_PCPU + E_CC_PDEV) ÷ (2 × E_CC) × 100, using Eurostat indicator codes for computing power, hosted development platform, and any paid cloud service. Both components weigh 50%. Values are rounded to one decimal after computation; every intermediate was checked in two independent passes (floating point and exact rational arithmetic).
Why these two components. Eurostat reports enterprise shares rather than spend. Email, office software and file storage are near-universal among cloud buyers and don’t discriminate between sectors; compute and development platforms are where workload migration, consumption billing and AI hosting live.
Scope. Eurostat covers EU enterprises with 10+ employees and excludes the financial sector, agriculture and mining — so banking, capital markets and insurance have IDC spending ranks but no WDR™ reading. WDR™ is a share-of-firms measure, not a dollar measure; it shows how widely deep cloud use has spread within a sector, not how much the sector spends. IDC’s industry dollar values beyond the published shares are subscription-only; Axis figures derived from IDC are stated as lower bounds.
About This Dataset
The dataset cloud-spending-by-industry.csv contains 142 rows: IDC 2026 industry and regional spending shares, Gartner segment spending (2024–2025), Eurostat 2025 cloud use by NACE sector, survey benchmarks from Flexera and the FinOps Foundation, and every WDR™ reading with its formula in the method_note column. Each row carries source organization, document, URL and retrieval date.
- License: CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution.
- Also on: Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub under Axis Intelligence Research.
How to Cite This Data
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Rodriguez, E. (2026, September 26). Cloud spending by industry 2026: Who buys the cloud, and who actually runs on it. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/cloud-spending-by-industry/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research, and Elena Rodriguez. “Cloud Spending by Industry 2026: Who Buys the Cloud, and Who Actually Runs on It.” Axis Intelligence, 26 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/cloud-spending-by-industry/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and Elena Rodriguez. “Cloud Spending by Industry 2026: Who Buys the Cloud, and Who Actually Runs on It.” Axis Intelligence, September 26, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/cloud-spending-by-industry/.
Cloud Spending by Industry: Questions Buyers and Analysts Ask
Which industry spends the most on public cloud in 2026?
Banking is the largest, followed by software and information services and retail. Together the three take 25% of worldwide public cloud spending, according to IDC’s March 2026 forecast — at least $250 billion, per Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation.
Why do banks spend more on cloud than software companies?
IDC ties banking’s spending to core-system modernization and AI-driven risk, fraud and real-time payment services. Banking is also among IDC’s fastest-growing industries for both total cloud spend and PaaS in 2026.
Is healthcare a top cloud-spending industry?
Healthcare providers rank in IDC’s second tier — the five industries after the top three that together account for more than a quarter of 2026 spending. They are not in the top three.
Which industries have moved the most workloads into the cloud?
In the EU, computer programming and IT services lead with a Workload Depth Ratio (WDR™) of 64.5, followed by the wider information and communication sector (60.7) and telecommunications (49.5), based on Eurostat 2025 data.
Why does manufacturing lag in cloud workloads?
Most EU manufacturers (53.96%) buy cloud, but mainly for office software, email and ERP. Their WDR™ of 21.2 shows few rent compute or development platforms, because production systems stay on-site for latency and uptime.
What is a good benchmark for cloud depth in my sector?
Compare your share of cloud-buying business units renting compute and dev platforms against your sector’s WDR™. The EU all-sector reading is 27.1; above your sector’s figure means deeper-than-peer adoption.
How much of industry cloud spending is wasted?
Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report estimates 29% of IaaS and PaaS spend is wasted, up for the first time in five years because of AI workloads.
Is IDC’s $1 trillion forecast the same as Gartner’s cloud spending figure?
No. IDC forecasts more than $1 trillion for 2026; Gartner’s last public figure is $723.4 billion for 2025. The firms use different market definitions, so their totals shouldn’t be averaged or compared as growth.
Related Axis research: cloud computing statistics · cloud market share by provider · FinOps and cloud waste data · AI infrastructure spending · AI agent adoption by industry · cybersecurity spending