Austin, Texas, USA, January 26, 2026
Futurum launches a 5-year AI Platforms report, forecasting a major rebalancing of the AI infrastructure market.
A significant rebalancing of the AI infrastructure landscape is underway, with hybrid and edge deployments projected to capture 43.5% of the total market share by 2030, according to a new Futurum Research report.
While public cloud services currently dominate the field, a shift toward localized processing is set to redefine how enterprises manage AI workloads.
Figure 1: AI Platform Market Share by Deployment Segment
Nick Patience, VP & AI Practice Lead at Futurum, said, “The shift we are seeing toward hybrid and edge AI is a direct response to the enterprise need for greater control. As organizations move past the initial hype, they are realizing that data gravity and privacy require bringing the models to the data, not just the data to the cloud.”
According to Futurum’s 2H 2025 AI Platforms Market Forecast, the era of public-cloud-only AI is transitioning into a more complex, multi-modal deployment environment.
- Public Cloud Dominance Cooling: After peaking at a 58.8% market share in 2026, public cloud/SaaS deployments are expected to decline to 46.3% by 2030.
- Hybrid’s Rapid Ascent: Hybrid and edge models are the fastest structural gainers, rising from 25% in 2024 to 43.5% by the end of the decade.
- Private and Niche Persistence: Private cloud and on-premises environments will maintain a steady, though shrinking, footprint of 8.1% by 2030, primarily serving highly regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare.
The move away from centralized cloud APIs is being fueled by three primary enterprise concerns: latency, privacy, and efficiency. As AI moves from experimental pilots into real-time production – such as industrial IoT and on-device assistants – the need for inference to occur near the data source becomes critical.
“From 2026 on, inference will become the primary revenue engine for this market,” noted Patience. “This shift necessitates an infrastructure strategy that prioritizes performance transparency and cost per token, especially as localized inference becomes the standard for real-time applications.”
Read more in the report, 2H 2025 AI Platforms Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast, on the Futurum Intelligence Platform.
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Author Information
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
