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Report: AI Budgets in Education Show No Sign of Decline

Key Takeaways

  • Education AI budgets are holding steady or increasing: Wasabi found that 98% of education organizations expect AI infrastructure budgets to increase or remain steady, with 46% planning increases.
  • Storage costs are the top AI implementation challenge: Half of education respondents cited data storage issues, including storage and access costs, as the No. 1 challenge for AI projects.
  • Cloud security and ROI remain pressure points: Only 47% feel confident keeping data unaltered and operational after a cyberattack, 44% lost access to public cloud data after an attack, and 37% of AI projects currently show positive ROI.

The vast majority of education organizations (98%) expect their AI infrastructure budgets to either increase or hold steady over the next year, according to a 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 business and IT leaders around the globe, including 241 respondents within the education sector, to learn about how they are managing rising infrastructure costs, scaling AI projects, strengthening data security, and more.

Institutions that are investing in AI are allocating 67% of that infrastructure spend to data, storage, and compute to run AI applications, the survey found. Other key findings specific to the education sector include:

  • Data storage challenges, such as the cost of storage and data access, are the number one challenge associated with AI project and solution implementation (cited by 50% of respondents).
  • Fee-related charges such as data egress, API operations, and access accounted for 54% of cloud storage spending in 2026, up four percentage points from 2025.
  • 41% of respondents said they exceeded their public cloud storage budgets last year.
  • Only 47% of institutions feel confident in their ability to keep data unaltered and operational after a cyber attack.
  • 44% of education respondents experienced loss of access to public cloud data in the last year due to a cyber attack.
  • 63% of institutions are using immutability to protect their data in the public cloud, up from 49% last year.
  • Only 37% of AI projects currently in place are achieving a positive ROI.
  • Education IT decision-makers expect the rate of positive ROI to increase to 47% over the next 12 months.

"Education institutions are eager to dive head-first into AI, but the survey data illustrates a concerning trend regarding expectations vs. fiscal realities," commented Andrew Smith, director of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and a former IDC analyst, in a statement. "To ensure long-term success of AI initiatives, IT buyers in education must consider both the technical challenges associated with their data (i.e., storage, migration, quality); as well as the long-term cost-efficiency of accessing, retaining, and securing this data. Avoiding costly, budget-breaking fees from hyperscaler infrastructure services should be a priority."

The full report is available for download on the Wasabi site (registration required).

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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