AI Budgets in Education Program No Indication of Decline
The vast bulk of education organizations (98%) expect their AI facilities budget plans to either boost or hold consistent over the next year, according to a current report from cloud storage provider Wasabi. Nealy half– 46%– reported planning to increase their AI spending.
For its 2026 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index, the company engaged independent market research agency Vanson Bourne to survey 1,700 organization and IT leaders around the globe, including 241 respondents within the education sector, to find out about how they are managing rising infrastructure costs, scaling AI tasks, reinforcing data security, and more.
Organizations that are buying AI are designating 67% of that facilities invest to information, storage, and calculate to run AI applications, the study discovered. Other essential findings particular to the education sector include:
- Data storage obstacles, such as the expense of storage and data access, are the number one difficulty connected with AI project and option application (mentioned by 50% of participants).
- Fee-related charges such as information egress, API operations, and access represented 54% of cloud storage spending in 2026, up 4 percentage points from 2025.
- 41% of participants said they surpassed their public cloud storage budgets in 2015.
- Only 47% of organizations feel great in their capability to keep information unaltered and operational after a cyber attack.
- 44% of education respondents experienced loss of access to public cloud information in the last year due to a cyber attack.
- 63% of organizations are utilizing immutability to safeguard their information in the general public cloud, up from 49% in 2015.
- Only 37% of AI tasks 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, however the survey data highlights a worrying pattern concerning expectations vs. financial truths,” commented Andrew Smith, director of technique and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and a former IDC analyst, in a statement. “To ensure long-lasting success of AI efforts, IT purchasers in education need to think about both the technical obstacles related to their information (i.e., storage, migration, quality); along with the long-lasting cost-efficiency of accessing, retaining, and protecting this data. Avoiding pricey, budget-breaking charges from hyperscaler infrastructure services ought to be a concern.”
The complete report is offered here on the Wasabi site (registration required).
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editorial director for Campus Innovation, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [e-mail protected]