Every year, consumers and businesses pour staggering amounts of money into IT devices- desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and printers. While annual spending has fluctuated since 2021, the past three years have seen steady growth, pushing the market toward a record-breaking $810 billion in 2025. This massive figure will push the total spending over the past decade to shocking highs.
According to data presented by Techgaged.com, the world has spent a jaw-dropping $8.5 trillion on IT devices in a decade, surpassing the combined economies of Germany and the United Kingdom.
If IT device spending were a country, it would be the third-largest economy in the world
The surging popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, IoT devices, and hybrid work models has fueled the need for high-performance devices, and this trend will only speed up in 2025.
According to the Gartner survey, global spending on IT devices hit $735 billion in 2024, or 6% more than the year before that. However, 2025 is set to witness an even bigger growth, with the annual spending surging by 10.3% to a record $810.2 billion. Moreover, this means 2025 will see the second-largest spending increase in a decade, trailing only the COVID-19-driven boom in 2021, when it soared by 15%.
Even the world’s wealthiest billionaires wouldn’t have enough to cover this bill, as $810 billion is more than the combined net worth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. But this shocking figure is just a fraction of the world’s total amount on IT devices over the past decade. With a record $810 billion in spending in 2025, the cumulative 10-year figure will hit a jaw-dropping $8.5 trillion.
To put this into perspective, If IT device spending were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest economy, following China and the United States. Also, the ten-year spending of $8.5 trillion outpaces three years’ worth of global defense budgets, and it is enough money to fund NASA for 85 years, with its annual budget being around $100 billion.
The world spends 25% more on IT devices annually than a decade ago
The Gartner data also revealed how much annual spending on IT devices has increased over the past ten years. Back in 2014, consumers and companies spent $646 billion on IT devices. The next three years saw similar annual spending before it hit over $700 billion for the first time in 2017. The next major leap came in 2021 when the pandemic fueled a massive surge in tech purchases, reaching over $808 billion that year.
According to the latest Gartner forecast, with a projected $810 billion in 2025, the world is now spending 25% or $164 billion more on PCs, tablets, and smartphones per year than a decade ago. For context, that $164 billion increase is more than the entire GDP of a country like Kuwait and close to that of Ukraine. In other words, in just ten years, global IT device spending has grown larger than the entire GDP of a mid-sized economy.
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