Uptime Institute's annual survey results are in.
Roughly one-third of data center owners and operators are running "some" AI training or inferencing workloads, says the Uptime Institute Annual Global Data Center Survey 2025.
The report describes those currently running AI workloads as being "early stage and cautious," but notes that a "significantly greater proportion" of companies surveyed are looking to follow suit.
The latest annual report is the result of responses collected from more than 800 data center owners and operators between April and May 2025, of which 43 percent are based in Europe and North America.
Across those surveyed, Uptime found that the top management concerns for operators and owners remain cost issues, with 38 percent "very concerned," shortly followed by forecasting future data center capacity requirements, with 36 percent.
Improving energy efficiency came in third, with power availability taking fourth place.
Power rack densities, while rising, are mostly in the 10-30kW range. Uptime states that few are exceeding 30kW, and extreme densities are "as yet rare."
Meanwhile, PUE is staying relatively flat, with a 2025 average of 1.54. According to Uptime, this is the sixth consecutive year that PUE has "virtually stood still."
Uptime further notes that "impactful" data center outages are decreasing, relative to the overall growth of IT, despite the "rise in headline coverage of data center failures." The report puts this down to a "reflection not of worsening performance but of the growing visibility and criticality of digital infrastructure in daily life."
Those outages that have occurred remain mostly related to power issues (45 percent), but this is less than 2024's 54 percent. The report theorizes that this could suggest that "recent investments in power redundancy, along with advances in distributed and software-based resiliency architectures, are starting to pay off."
Separate research from Uptime found that those power outages were mostly related to UPS failures, followed by issues with power switches and generator failures.
On the cloud-on-prem debate, Uptime said that currently around 55 percent of workloads are hosted off-premises in some capacity, meaning 45 percent remains in on-premises data centers. The off-prem percentage is expected to grow slightly to 58 percent in 2027.
Staffing remains a consistent challenge for data center operators. Nearly half of operators told Uptime that they experience difficulties in finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, while around 37 percent have retention struggles.
Speaking on the findings of the report, Uptime Institute's executive director of research, Andy Lawrence, said: "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.
"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.”
Other findings from the report included that sustainability reporting has taken a hit - put down to the commercial pressures to support AI and easing regulatory requirements in some areas.
Uptime also noted the use of AI by data center operators, with the top benefits listed by those surveyed as being increased facility efficiency (58 percent), lower risk of human error (51 percent), and increased staff productivity (48 percent).
