The $90 Billion Question: Where Automotive IT Spend Goes

We ran an OrbitShift scan across the 10 largest global automotive OEMs, including Toyota, Volkswagen Group, Stellantis, Ford, General Motors, BMW Group, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, and Nissan. Combined, these ten accounts represent roughly $76B in modeled 2026 IT spend (excluding Toyota's data anomaly, flagged below).

Here's what the data reveals about where the real enterprise opportunities lie.

Manufacturing is the automotive spend signature

IT infrastructure absorbs 50% of modeled spend across the cohort. The #2 category is where automotive differs from other sectors we've scanned: Manufacturing takes 14.4% of spend here, ahead of Sales & Marketing (11.5%). In healthcare and banking scans, Sales & Marketing usually holds that #2 spot. The reason: every OEM in this list is retooling plants for EVs, building gigacasting lines, and standing up battery assembly capacity alongside software modernization.

Every account is transforming in the same direction

Electrification and software-defined vehicles show up in the priorities of all 10 accounts. Manufacturing footprint restructuring, plant closures, retooling, right-sizing for EVs, also shows up in all 10. Battery supply chain buildout appears in 9 of 10, and strategic partnerships or M&A activity in 8 of 10.

A few concrete examples: Stellantis committed €60B to its FaSTLAne 2030 plan and is consolidating onto a single STLA One architecture. Ford dissolved its BlueOval SK joint venture to pivot into energy storage, while separately building a low-cost Universal EV Platform through its California skunkworks team. Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi are in talks to integrate under a shared holding company. Toyota is taking Toyota Industries private and merging Hino and Mitsubishi Fuso under a new commercial vehicle entity, ARCHION.

India GCCs run deep here

Nine of the 10 accounts run an India GCC, several among the largest and oldest in the country. Ford's FIT center in Chennai and Bengaluru has 11,000+ employees and predates the EV pivot. GM's Bengaluru center dates to 2003. Toyota Connected India and Hyundai's HTCI in Hyderabad are both scaling directly against SDV platform work, Arene and Pleos Connect respectively. Tesla is the exception: its India presence is still emerging, with no dedicated large-scale GCC announced as of this scan.

Beyond the top 10, fresh GCC activity in the last six months skews toward suppliers rather than OEMs. Ford opened a third India hub in Coimbatore for finance and business operations. Eaton, Festo, and TVH all expanded India centers in the same window, supporting automotive supply chains and plant automation from the supplier side.

One data note: Toyota's revenue is recorded at $3,030,000M in our DB, against its actual ~$279B FY2024 revenue. This looks like a data entry error and inflates Toyota's modeled IT spend proportionally. Treat that row with caution until corrected.

For account teams: manufacturing-heavy IT spend and long-established India GCCs mean platform decisions increasingly get shaped where the engineering happens, not only where the headquarters sits. Map both sides.