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Internet of Things statistics — 2025 and 2026

The Internet of Things sat on every analyst’s “transformational technology” list for the better part of a decade. The numbers are now in: connected-device deployment did indeed grow into the tens of billions, and continues to compound. This page is the reference resource Information Matters maintains on the headline IoT figures, drawn from primary-source forecasts and updated as the major firms publish.

Information Matters’ active research focus is now agentic AI — see our methodology and the Q1-2026 agentic AI market report — but IoT remains the substrate underneath much of the data that agentic AI systems will consume, and the figures below are useful to investors, vendors and corporate buyers thinking about either side of that boundary.

Connected device numbers

The number of connected IoT devices in 2025 sits in the range of 19–42 billion depending on which counting methodology is used. The major published forecasts disagree on inclusion criteria — whether to count consumer wearables, whether to include multi-function devices once or several times, whether to include cellular-only or all radio types — which produces the wide spread.

The most-cited primary-source forecasts are:

• IDC — 41.6 billion connected IoT devices in 2025, generating 79.4 zettabytes of data (IDC Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT Forecast, as cited by Business Wire).
• IoT Analytics — 21.1 billion connected IoT devices by end of 2025, growing 14% year-on-year, with a forecast 39 billion by 2030 (CAGR 13.2% from 2025). Source: IoT Analytics, 2025.
• Statista — 19.8 billion in 2025, growing to more than 40.6 billion by 2034. Source: Statista, 2025.

The figures converge at the order of magnitude — tens of billions of connected devices, doubling roughly each decade — even where the specific counts diverge.

Data generation

IDC’s 2025 forecast estimates connected IoT devices will generate 79.4 zettabytes of data in 2025. That figure has not been updated to 2026 publicly at time of writing.

For context, one zettabyte equals one trillion gigabytes, and the global volume of data generated by all sources (not just IoT) is in the high-hundreds of zettabytes range and growing at approximately 25–30% per year.

Regional distribution

The 2025 IoT-device installed base is heavily weighted toward Asia-Pacific:

• Greater China — approximately 6,896 million IoT devices in 2025 (Statista, 2025).
• North America — approximately 6,896 million (Statista, 2025).
• Europe — approximately 4,311 million (Statista, 2025).

Cellular-IoT subscribers, a narrower category, are dominated by China — approximately 70% of global cellular IoT connections per recent GSMA reporting, reflecting both the country’s industrial-IoT deployments and its connected-vehicle growth.

2026 outlook and what these figures don’t capture

Estimates for end-2026 cluster between 19 and 27 billion connected devices under conservative methodologies (cellular and primary-radio only) and 40+ billion under expansive ones (every connected sensor, every multi-function device). The order-of-magnitude story is unchanged from 2025: the IoT installed base is large, growing, and increasingly the source of data that AI systems — particularly agentic AI systems running in industrial, supply-chain and consumer contexts — will operate on top of.

What these statistics do not capture, and what is increasingly the more important question for buyers and investors, is what proportion of those connected devices generate business-actionable data — data that is well-structured, well-curated, and consumable by the analytical systems that sit above it. The headline device-count is impressive but a connected device generating poorly-structured telemetry that no system reads is closer to noise than to value.

This is where the IoT story and the agentic-AI story converge, and where Information Matters’ active analytical focus has moved. The 2025 question is no longer “how many connected devices” but “how much of the data they generate is being put to useful work.” For our current view on that question, see the Q1-2026 agentic AI market report and our work on data quality and curation in the agentic AI stack.

Sources

This page is updated semi-annually as primary-source forecasts publish.

• IDC Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT Forecast.
• IoT Analytics — State of IoT 2025.
• Statista — IoT connections worldwide.
• GSMA Mobile Economy reports.
• Cisco Annual Internet Report (most recent edition).