Data Centers Preparing for Unpredictable AI Workload Demand

The data center industry is innovative and resilient, but also facing rising costs, worsening power constraints, and challenges in meeting the demands for AI, according to the Global Data Center Survey 2025 from Uptime Institute.

As operators expand and modernize to meet power and density requirements, they must address availability, efficiency, staffing challenges, supply chain delays, and unpredictable technological advances.

"Our data shows operators are tasked with managing a lot of big strategic challenges at the same time. These include anticipating multiple technological changes, planning for expansion in spite of major constraints on power availability, and preparing for and supporting unpredictable AI workload demand," said Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Institute. "This is a time where senior level experience is critical. But for the first time, more operators are finding it harder to recruit and retain senior people than people at an earlier stage of their career. There is a management shortage, with many experienced leaders retiring just as another phase of dramatic growth gets underway."

Roughly one-third of data center owners and operators currently perform some AI training or inference, and a significantly greater proportion plan to do so in the future. But much of this is early stage and cautious. Uncertainty over the appropriate or likely venues for AI workloads, and apprehension over the power demands of projected NVIDIA GPU systems, is likely contributing to capacity concerns.

Now in its 15th year, Uptime Institute's annual survey is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of its kind. The findings of this report highlight the practices and experiences of data center owners and operators in the areas of resiliency, sustainability, efficiency, staffing, cloud, and artificial intelligence.

Key findings from the 2025 report include:

  • Cost issues remain the top concern for digital infrastructure management teams in 2025 — but worries around forecasting future capacity requirements have grown significantly.
  • Average PUE levels show little change for the sixth consecutive year, with improvements constrained by legacy infrastructure and some climate specific limitations to efficient cooling.
  • Average server rack power densities continue to rise, with greater adoption of racks in the 10–30 kW range. Few facilities exceed 30 kW, and extreme densities are as yet rare.
  • The collection and reporting of key sustainability metrics have not improved in 2025, which is likely due in part to commercial pressures to support AI, and easing regulatory pressure in some regions.
  • Trust in AI for data center operations depends on the use case: most would allow its use for analyzing sensor data and predictive maintenance tasks, but not configuration changes, controlling equipment, or staffing issues.
  • Impactful data center outages are gradually becoming less frequent — but one in ten still cause serious or severe disruption, underscoring the need for continued investment.
  • Enterprises continue to adopt hybrid IT strategies, spanning cloud, colocation on-premises data centers. On-premises data centers remain foundational for those with large, mission critical processing needs, with 45% of IT workloads still residing in corporate facilities.
  • Staffing challenges persist in 2025. Nearly two-thirds of operators report difficulty retaining staff, finding qualified candidates, or both.

Methodology: Uptime conducted this year's Annual Global Data Center Survey online and via email from April to May 2025 and collected responses from more than 800 data center owners and operators. For the third consecutive year, Uptime's survey asked data center operators to identify their management team's top concerns related to digital infrastructure. In 2025, new response options were added to reflect the evolving challenges surrounding power availability, supply chain disruptions, and demand for AI.

The survey participants represent a wide range of industry verticals in multiple countries. Nearly half (43%) are located in North America and Europe. Approximately one in five respondents work for professional IT / data center service providers — that is, staff with operational or executive responsibilities for a third-party data center, such as those offering colocation, wholesale, software or cloud computing services.

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Data Centers Preparing for Unpredictable AI Workload Demand

The data center industry is innovative and resilient, but also facing rising costs, worsening power constraints, and challenges in meeting the demands for AI, according to the Global Data Center Survey 2025 from Uptime Institute.

As operators expand and modernize to meet power and density requirements, they must address availability, efficiency, staffing challenges, supply chain delays, and unpredictable technological advances.

"Our data shows operators are tasked with managing a lot of big strategic challenges at the same time. These include anticipating multiple technological changes, planning for expansion in spite of major constraints on power availability, and preparing for and supporting unpredictable AI workload demand," said Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Institute. "This is a time where senior level experience is critical. But for the first time, more operators are finding it harder to recruit and retain senior people than people at an earlier stage of their career. There is a management shortage, with many experienced leaders retiring just as another phase of dramatic growth gets underway."

Roughly one-third of data center owners and operators currently perform some AI training or inference, and a significantly greater proportion plan to do so in the future. But much of this is early stage and cautious. Uncertainty over the appropriate or likely venues for AI workloads, and apprehension over the power demands of projected NVIDIA GPU systems, is likely contributing to capacity concerns.

Now in its 15th year, Uptime Institute's annual survey is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of its kind. The findings of this report highlight the practices and experiences of data center owners and operators in the areas of resiliency, sustainability, efficiency, staffing, cloud, and artificial intelligence.

Key findings from the 2025 report include:

  • Cost issues remain the top concern for digital infrastructure management teams in 2025 — but worries around forecasting future capacity requirements have grown significantly.
  • Average PUE levels show little change for the sixth consecutive year, with improvements constrained by legacy infrastructure and some climate specific limitations to efficient cooling.
  • Average server rack power densities continue to rise, with greater adoption of racks in the 10–30 kW range. Few facilities exceed 30 kW, and extreme densities are as yet rare.
  • The collection and reporting of key sustainability metrics have not improved in 2025, which is likely due in part to commercial pressures to support AI, and easing regulatory pressure in some regions.
  • Trust in AI for data center operations depends on the use case: most would allow its use for analyzing sensor data and predictive maintenance tasks, but not configuration changes, controlling equipment, or staffing issues.
  • Impactful data center outages are gradually becoming less frequent — but one in ten still cause serious or severe disruption, underscoring the need for continued investment.
  • Enterprises continue to adopt hybrid IT strategies, spanning cloud, colocation on-premises data centers. On-premises data centers remain foundational for those with large, mission critical processing needs, with 45% of IT workloads still residing in corporate facilities.
  • Staffing challenges persist in 2025. Nearly two-thirds of operators report difficulty retaining staff, finding qualified candidates, or both.

Methodology: Uptime conducted this year's Annual Global Data Center Survey online and via email from April to May 2025 and collected responses from more than 800 data center owners and operators. For the third consecutive year, Uptime's survey asked data center operators to identify their management team's top concerns related to digital infrastructure. In 2025, new response options were added to reflect the evolving challenges surrounding power availability, supply chain disruptions, and demand for AI.

The survey participants represent a wide range of industry verticals in multiple countries. Nearly half (43%) are located in North America and Europe. Approximately one in five respondents work for professional IT / data center service providers — that is, staff with operational or executive responsibilities for a third-party data center, such as those offering colocation, wholesale, software or cloud computing services.

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How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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