AI Budgets in Education Show No Indication of Decline
The large majority of education organizations (98%) anticipate their AI infrastructure spending plans to either increase or hold stable over the next year, according to a current report from cloud storage service provider Wasabi. Nealy half– 46%– reported planning to increase their AI spending.
For its 2026 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index, the company engaged independent marketing research agency Vanson Bourne to survey 1,700 company and IT leaders around the world, including 241 respondents within the education sector, to learn more about how they are handling increasing facilities costs, scaling AI projects, strengthening data security, and more.
Organizations that are purchasing AI are allocating 67% of that infrastructure invest to data, storage, and compute to run AI applications, the survey found. Other key findings particular to the education sector consist of:
- Data storage difficulties, such as the expense of storage and data access, are the top challenge related to AI task and option application (mentioned by 50% of participants).
- Fee-related charges such as information egress, API operations, and gain access to represented 54% of cloud storage spending in 2026, up 4 percentage points from 2025.
- 41% of participants said they surpassed their public cloud storage spending plans in 2015.
- Only 47% of organizations feel confident in their capability to keep data unaltered and operational after a cyber attack.
- 44% of education respondents experienced loss of access to public cloud information in the in 2015 due to a cyber attack.
- 63% of organizations are using immutability to secure their information in the public cloud, up from 49% in 2015.
- Just 37% of AI projects currently in place are attaining a positive ROI.
- Education IT decision-makers anticipate the rate of positive ROI to increase to 47% over the next 12 months.
“Education organizations are eager to dive head-first into AI, but the survey information highlights a concerning trend concerning expectations vs. financial realities,” commented Andrew Smith, director of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and a former IDC analyst, in a statement. “To guarantee long-lasting success of AI efforts, IT purchasers in education need to think about both the technical difficulties related to their information (i.e., storage, migration, quality); in addition to the long-term cost-efficiency of accessing, maintaining, and securing this information. Preventing expensive, budget-breaking charges from hyperscaler facilities services must be a priority.”
The full report is available here on the Wasabi website (registration required).
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email safeguarded]