Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are shifting their spending priorities with generative AI at the forefront, according to a new survey from Bloomberg Intelligence.

According to the survey of 50 US-based CIOs, instead of spending on servers, storage, and networking, investments in large language model deployment are taking priority.

60% of CIOs reported plans to increase spending on AI inferencing workloads, the survey found.

This year, AI investments ranked higher compared to prior surveys, with the growing emphasis suggesting a rising in AI’s importance as competitive leverage.

Infrastructure necessary for building the backbone of AI, including foundation models, GPUs, and cloud all ranked as high priorities for CIOs.

The results also indicate that 70% of corporations are now using OpenAI, up from 41% in December 2023.

The survey also tracked the success of competing companies in the AI race, from chip manufacturers to cloud providers.

While Nvidia was leading the charge in the GPU race, Intel was rising as a preferred CPU choice for AI servers.

Further, as enterprises progress on their AI journeys, many are at the stage where they can deploy their AI copilots.

This has lead to a shift in the scale for hyperscale cloud value for data analysis among CIOs employing AI. Microsoft came out on top, rising 14 points with their Azure cloud offering. Google gained five points since the last survey, but Amazon fell 17 points.

Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that spending on AI models and their associated workload will only increase in the next year as enterprises progress into larger-scale deployments of their AI tech.

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“We’re witnessing a significant shift in CIO preferences as enterprise AIs move towards the deployment of their copilots, with 66% of respondents saying they are in the process of deployment compared to December’s 32%,” Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence said.

“This, coupled with newfound visibility in the need for robust cybersecurity spending in the wake of the CrowdStrike disruption, have significantly shifted the spending needs of CIOs even in the last six months.”

That being said, cybersecurity dominated IT spending in July with 40% of CIO respondents citing it as their top priority, nearly double that amount at the end of last year.

This could be influenced by concurrent events – the survey was taken in the wake of the CrowdStrike outage, which was only set to increase the mainstream importance of cybersecurity.

Since the last survey, servers, storage, and networking were all deprioritised.