Uptime Institute's 15th Annual Global Data Center Survey 2025: Challenges and innovations

The Uptime Institute has released its 15th Annual Global Data Center Survey 2025, a pivotal report that enlightens the current state and evolving challenges of global data centres. As operators strive to modernise and enhance their facilities to accommodate increasing power and density requirements, they face a myriad of obstacles such as cost control, staffing shortages, and unpredictability in technological advancements.

The survey exposes pressing concerns about the sustainability and efficiency of today’s data centres. Despite advances, the legacy infrastructures continue to place limitations on achieving optimal cooling, resulting in stagnant average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) levels—unchanged for six consecutive years. This is concerning as emphasis grows on both efficiency and resiliency.

“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.”

Simultaneously, the demand from AI technologies adds complexity to traditional operational strategies. While around a third of data centres engage in AI training or inference, the majority are taking initial cautious steps. Concerns persist about whether their infrastructure can manage future capacity and power demands, especially with forthcoming NVIDIA GPU systems.

On the positive side, outages are less frequent, though their potential impact remains noteworthy, with 10% causing severe disruptions. Enterprises continue to rely on hybrid IT strategies, encompassing cloud, collocation, and on-premises solutions—45% of workloads still sit within corporate-owned data centres, illustrating their continued critical role.

Key Findings from the 2025 Report:

• Cost challenges remain at the forefront of digital infrastructure concerns.
• Lackluster progress in key sustainability metrics, partly due to prioritisation of AI needs.
• Adoption of racks in the 10-30 kW range begins to rise, although extreme densities remain uncommon.
• Trust in AI varies significantly by use case, with acceptance more likely in predictive tasks versus dynamic control.
• Persistent staffing issues, with two-thirds of operators struggling to find or retain skilled labour.

The survey, conducted between April and May 2025 with over 800 respondents, is a benchmark in understanding the operational concerns of contemporary data centres. With participants spanning diverse industries across the globe, it sheds light on how facilities are manoeuvring through shifting landscapes of power availability, supply chain delays, and burgeoning AI demands.