Austin, Texas, USA, October 13, 2026

Futurum releases its 2H 2026 Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure market forecast alongside buyer research from its Hardware Purchasing module, which shows server prices rising for 71.3% of buyers and supplier constraints nearly doubling in six months.

Futurum’s 2H 2026 Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Global Enterprise Decision Maker Survey Report, drawing on its Hardware Purchasing module fielded in July 2026 among 103 enterprise hardware buyers, 87 of them server buyers, finds server and CPU buyers reporting price increases at close to the rate GPU buyers do, 71.3% against 78.7%, and up from 60.2% in January 2026 (see Figure 1). The companion 2H 2026 Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast shows where that scarcity lands in revenue: Edge & Colocation Infrastructure is projected to multiply 3.27x from $16.9B in CY2025 to $55.2B in CY2031.

Figure 1: Hardware Price Change over the Past Six Months, Servers vs. Power, GPUs & Other Components

Q: Compared with 6 months ago, how have prices for each of the following hardware components changed relative to typical pricing patterns for that category? (Hardware Purchasing module, January and July 2026) n=87 (Servers/CPUs)/42 (Power & Cooling)/47 (GPUs/Accelerators) in July 2026; n=93 (Servers/CPUs) in January 2026. Mean of Other 4 Components is the unweighted mean of the four remaining tracked categories. | Source: Futurum Research, September 2026

Power and cooling is the one relative exception at 47.6%. Almost no buyers in any category report falling prices; in fact, reports of price decreases are at just 1.1% for servers, and zero for both power/cooling and GPUs. This cost shock reaches every component of a hybrid estate, not just the accelerators.

Alastair Cooke, Research Director, Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure at Futurum, said, “Buyers spent two years treating scarcity as a GPU problem, and the July data says it stopped being one. Once the server itself prices and ships like a constrained good, the build-versus-rent decision changes for every workload in the estate, not only the AI ones.”

The research reveals several key developments shaping enterprise infrastructure purchasing:

• Supply tightened faster than price. The share of server buyers reporting more constrained supplier availability climbed from 25.8% in January 2026 to 47.1% in July 2026, a 21.3 point move in two quarters, and the share reporting easier supply fell to zero. For GPUs, the constrained share is 66.0%, and 33.2% of server buyers are quoted lead times of four months or more.
• Buyers expect no relief and are buying capacity instead of deferring it. 59.7% of server buyers expect prices to rise again over the next six months, against 63.8% for GPUs and 38.1% for power and cooling. 35.6% of server buyers expect their purchasing volume to increase over the next six months, against 13.8% who expect it to decrease, and dedicated or hosted private infrastructure rose from 48.1% to 56.3% of hardware buyers over the same six months.
• The forecast follows the power curve, not the demand curve. Edge & Colocation Infrastructure growth troughs at 17.4% in CY2027, where interconnect queues and construction schedules bite hardest, then rises every year to 26.6% in CY2031 as contracted capacity energizes. Its forward CAGR of 21.8% exceeds its own CY2022 to CY2025 history of 18.3% by 3.5 points.

Edge & Colocation Infrastructure is supply-gated rather than demand-gated. Grid interconnect queues, transformer and switchgear lead times, and data center construction schedules cap how much capacity can be energized, whatever is contracted. That makes it the only submarket in the Futurum model whose forward growth rate exceeds its own history, and it recovers mix, from 13.0% of the market in CY2025 to 13.2% in CY2031 after falling from 15.1%, as the forecast takes the total market from $129.7B to $419.1B.

Figure 2: Edge & Colocation Infrastructure Revenue, CY2022 to CY2031

“The vendors who can commit to delivery dates and interconnection capacity will take a share from the ones who can only quote a price,” noted Cooke. “The binding constraint has moved from the budget to the power envelope. That is a procurement conversation before it is a product one.”

The hybrid estate is absorbing the cost shock rather than waiting it out. More hardware buyers now purchase or deploy dedicated or hosted private infrastructure, 56.3% against 48.1% in January 2026; on-premises hosting of AI applications is up from 34.0% in March 2025 to 37.4% in September 2026; and Edge & Colocation Infrastructure recovers mix from 13.0% of the market in CY2025 to 13.2% in CY2031 after years of losing it. Buyers are not betting on prices coming back.

Read more in the reports “2H 2026 Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Global Enterprise Decision Maker Survey Report” and “2H 2026 Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast” on the Futurum Intelligence Platform. Non-subscribers click here for more information.

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