Most AI market talk is about spending on chips and data centers. Omdia’s latest forecast is about what customers pay for the software running on top of them. Released November 10, its Artificial Intelligence Software Market Forecasts puts global AI software revenue above $200 billion in 2026, double the 2024 level.
The firm says this is the largest upward revision to its semiannual outlook since the pandemic. Generative AI software revenue is now expected to grow 139% this year, well ahead of earlier projections. Agentic AI is growing faster still, from a smaller base.
What’s counted
The definition matters. Omdia counts only the AI component of a product, what it calls AI value-add. The $200 billion isn’t total cloud infrastructure spending, and it isn’t the full revenue of every enterprise application that now has an AI feature. That makes it a narrower and more useful number than headline totals that sweep in anything with AI in the brochure.
The forecast covers agentic, generative and predictive AI across about 120 use cases, 20 industry sectors and eight regions. Omdia has published it continuously since 2016.
Where the growth comes from
Omdia points to three sources. Leading foundation model providers are growing revenue three to ten times year over year. Hyperscalers are reporting triple-digit growth in their AI cloud segments. Enterprise software vendors are racing to ship AI-enhanced and AI-native products, from coding assistants to customer service automation.
The line between generative and agentic AI is starting to blur. Principal forecaster Neil Dunay argues that as assistants gain agent capabilities and automated workflows replace human prompting, the market may be better split by level of autonomy than by technology label.
Why investors should care
The software number is the other side of the capex ledger. Hyperscalers spent about $237 billion in a single quarter on infrastructure, as our AI Capex Tracker shows. A full year of AI software revenue at around $200 billion is still smaller than that annualised spend. The gap is the payback question behind the recent selloff.
Omdia expects growth to moderate after 2026 as the market matures, while staying strong; it projects about 30% compound annual growth from 2025 to 2031. A doubling in two years is real demand. Whether it arrives fast enough to cover the bill for the data centers is the debate the market is having right now.
