Most corporate IT is off premises. Data center costs, staffing remain difficult, Uptime reports

Corporate data centers continue to lose workload share to colocation and cloud providers. Meanwhile, data center operators face mounting challenges tied to AI adoption, including increasingly difficult capacity planning, persistent staffing shortages, and more expensive outages.

Third-party data center facilities and services—including colocation, cloud, hosting, and SaaS providers—account for 46% of IT workloads in 2026, edging past the 44% in enterprise-owned corporate data centers, according to Uptime Institute’s 16th Annual Global Data Center Survey. This is the first time in Uptime’s annual survey history that third-party data center venues have held the larger share of enterprise IT workloads than corporate-owned facilities. Uptime expects the gap to widen to 48% versus 42% by 2028, although it says enterprise facilities will remain a key part of hybrid IT strategies, with security and regulatory requirements continuing to keep many workloads on premises.

Uptime’s survey, conducted between April and May, collected responses from more than 1,600 participants worldwide, including more than 800 data center owners and operators.

“All of these are linked, and they’re all linked through AI,” Andy Lawrence, Uptime’s executive director of research, said during a webinar discussing the findings. “The pressures it’s putting on the entire supply chain, the cost base, the availability of power—all of these are being driven by this massive surge in demand for AI infrastructure.”

Cost pressures ease, AI creates new challenges

Cost remains management’s top concern for the fourth straight year, with 79% of respondents saying executives are at least somewhat concerned. But the share describing management as “very concerned” fell to 38%, from 44% last year.

The results suggest operators are balancing cost concerns against a broader set of AI-related challenges. Concern about forecasting future capacity requirements climbed to 76%, while supply-chain disruptions, staffing…