The AI industry will have to generate about $6T in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure that demand implies, according to Bain and Company’s 2026 Global Technology Report.
The math starts with capital spending. Bain expects hyperscaler capex to reach roughly $780B in 2026, nearly five times the level of three years earlier, and puts annual AI infrastructure spending at up to $1.5T by 2031. Assuming capex settles near a quarter of industry revenue, the required top line lands at $6T.
Existing uses get part of the way there. Bain estimates that consumer subscriptions plus enterprise software, sales, marketing and support will contribute between $1.2T and $1.8T. That leaves about $4.2T to be found elsewhere.
The report sketches where it might come from. Advertising woven into AI assistants could add a few hundred billion. Autonomous vehicles, trucks, drones and industrial automation might contribute roughly $400B. Simulations, digital twins and robotics add as much as $900B.
That still leaves a shortfall of about $2.7T, which Bain assigns to products that do not exist yet, including drug discovery, materials science and research acceleration.
The report notes that its own forecast a year earlier called for $2T by 2030, a figure that has since trebled. The fastest-growing hardware segments it flags are high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging and custom silicon.
