Large enterprises will significantly miscalculate their AI infrastructure costs over the next couple of years, prompting more CIOs to expand the scope of their FinOps teams, IDC predicts.
Enterprise AI users are headed for an “AI infrastructure reckoning,” as CIOs and finance leaders realize that standard budget forecasting doesn’t work for compute-heavy AI projects, says Jevin Jensen, IDC’s vice president of infrastructure and operations research. Global 1,000 companies will underestimate their AI infrastructure costs by 30% through 2027, IDC predicts.
The cost of ramping up AI projects is fundamentally different than launching a new ERP solution and other IT systems that enterprises have been deploying for decades, Jensen says. Calculating the cost of GPUs, inference, networking, and tokens can be much more complicated than planning a budget for a more traditional IT system, and CIOs also need to consider security, governance, and employee training costs.
