Cloud and services are 44% of Mexico's tech spend but over 92% of growth

Servers, storage arrays, printers and PCs sit at the bottom of Mexican companies' 2026 technology priority lists. At the top, tied for first place, are AI agents and cybersecurity.

Mexico Business News, in a Nov. 11 look at corporate tech budgets, cited consultancies Select and IDC projecting total organizational ICT spending of MX$547 billion (US$31.8 billion) by year-end. That's a 4.1% annual increase. Select's survey work, which Diego Valverde covered for the same outlet in February, puts that pace below the region's historical averages. So overall growth is modest. Where the money goes inside that total has changed a lot more.

Ricardo Zermeño, Select's general director, quantified the change. ICT services and cloud account for 44% of the market and more than 92% of its growth, with operating expenses and cloud pulling the market forward while direct equipment purchases lag. Cloud and services make up 44% of Mexico's corporate tech market and more than 92% of its growth, which puts this year's real buying decisions inside subscription contracts. For a CIO or IT procurement director at a Mexican manufacturer or distributor, the money now gets decided in renewal terms, usage commitments and the security review attached to each provider, more than in hardware refresh requests.

Where the 4.1% comes from

Select's segment projections show the split. Public cloud is expected to reach MX$64.57 billion, up 16.1%. ICT services reach MX$172 billion, up 6.7%. Connectivity barely moves, and traditional software shrinks. Dividing the two growth rates, public cloud is expanding at roughly four times the pace of the market as a whole.

Hardware's slide has several causes. Boards want proof that AI moves business results, and they don't much care whether the capability is built in-house or rented from a provider. Semiconductor and memory shortages have also made physical equipment harder to buy. Software-defined and cloud-native setups ask for less capital up front, so they win the budget meeting. Select analyst Arely Reyes Gaspar added that cloud services grew 18% and value-added software 12% the year before. She also said a significant share of computing power is now bought from external providers instead of run in on-premise data centers.

The 1.0% decline in traditional software fits the same pattern: Select frames it as the continuation of a migration to cloud that has been running for years. For finance and procurement teams that still review IT mainly through capital requests, the 92% figure suggests most new tech spending will arrive through operating budgets and vendor renewals. Those lines tend to get approved one subscription at a time, so they're harder to see as a whole.

AI agents get funded if they pay back

The Nov. 11 report puts dollar figures on the two priorities that tied for first. The use cases are specific: agentic AI workflows, automated customer service, conversational commerce and supply chain forecasting. Next on Select's list come advanced analytics and moving ERP systems to the cloud.

Money for agents comes with a condition. Nayid Aguilar, president of Creai, told El Economista that many organizations mix up chatbots, which are essentially decision trees, with agents that can make decisions and guide a process on their own once configured. He also said executives often call AI important while daily operations change very little. The companies moving ahead are funding agents with a clear financial return. When the return doesn't hold up, they postpone, even if the operational benefits look appealing.

Databricks' 2026 State of AI Agents report shows why that distinction matters. Sixty-six percent of organizations use AI-powered tools, but fully autonomous agents are at 19%. In Latin America, adoption centers on real-time inference and narrow use cases like loan origination, which accounts for 10% of regional activity. When a vendor pitches an "agent," buyers should ask which decisions the system makes by itself and which it hands back to a person. The answer decides whether the ROI case is real.

Security budgets and the AI oversight gap

Read quickly, a US$1.48 billion security commitment looks like it settles the AI risk question. The 90% figure says it doesn't. Most Mexican security chiefs have taken on AI oversight without matching resources. Australia shows a similar pattern: recruiter Peoplebank, citing Proofpoint's 2026 Voice of the CISO report, puts the share of Australian CISOs managing expanding AI risk without proportional resources at 79%, in a market where Gartner forecasts security spending above AU$7.5 billion this year. The gap seems to show up wherever AI adoption moves faster than security staffing, even when budgets are rising.

DNSFilter's latest report, covered by Eric Geller at Cybersecurity Dive on Nov. 4, makes the same point with survey data. Three-quarters of the 400 IT and cybersecurity workers surveyed had increased budgets over the past year. Four in 10 said their next dollar would go to AI security and governance, well ahead of cloud security at 25%. Yet 46% were confident unapproved AI apps were connected to company systems. Thirty-seven percent only learn about employees' AI connections after the fact, and another 7% don't require notification at all. Sixty-two percent weren't sure all their security tools were properly configured.

DNSFilter's own conclusion was that spending on governance and actually having governance are different things. That matters in Mexico, where security leaders now treat shadow AI monitoring, multidisciplinary AI governance and operational technology protection as board-level responsibilities, according to experts at regional forums cited in the Nov. 11 report. A budget line pays for a policy. Someone still has to see what's connected.

Monterrey, Saltillo, Juárez and Guadalajara feel it first

Nearshoring is what makes this more than a line-item reshuffle. As manufacturers move production and assembly into the industrial corridors around Monterrey, Saltillo, Ciudad Juárez and Guadalajara, local tech infrastructure has to grow alongside them to support automated logistics, smart manufacturing and industrial connectivity. A plant IT lead there is the person most likely to run into a cloud-first budget and a factory floor that still needs networks, sensors and protected OT.

That's where Select's flat 0.5% connectivity projection stands out. Nationally, connectivity is the slowest-growing category in a market whose growth is going almost entirely to cloud and services. For operators building new lines in these corridors, network and OT security requirements may need to go into plant specifications now, before they end up competing for attention with subscription renewals that are easier to approve.

People are the other constraint. Training efforts are growing: the Instituto Politécnico Nacional runs microelectronics cleanrooms, the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency has launched public AI training centers, and programs that link universities and industrial chambers with vendors like NVIDIA and SoftServe are speeding up certification. The 1.4 million-role gap is large, though. Australia offers one comparison: Peoplebank's own data shows cyber roles there take an average of 33 days to fill, eight days longer than other tech roles, and 84% of its cyber placements in FY26 were contracts. That's one recruiter in one market. Still, it suggests how companies are getting scarce AI security skills when hiring permanent staff takes too long.

The signal worth watching is whether connectivity and OT security move up the next round of Select priority rankings. If they do, spending in the corridors is starting to match what the plants there need.