Data center operators are caught in a perfect storm of soaring costs, staffing shortages, and an evolving stance on AI technology. Even as the need for digital services grows, the financial strain of running and upgrading facilities is becoming increasingly burdensome. According to the Uptime Institute’s 14th annual Global Data Center Survey [PDF], costs related to energy, equipment, labor, construction, and infrastructure upgrades are top concerns for operators.
This year, a striking 44% of survey respondents voiced significant anxiety about these expenses, with another 36% somewhat worried. While predicting upcoming capacity and improving energy performance is crucial, those efforts frequently took 2nd place to the idea of minimizing costs here and now. Additionally, it reports that while AI and high performance computing have garnered much attention recently, the reality of their effect on the data center industry as a whole is still taking shape. Confidence in AI to act on operational decisions took a third consecutive year of decreases – 42% say they are not comfortable with it.
Operators point to issues like transparency, cybersecurity risks, and potential new points of failure as key reasons for their skepticism. Interestingly, increased exposure to AI often leads to less trust in it, a sentiment that media reports of high-profile AI failures only exacerbate. This growing mistrust could slow AI adoption in critical data center operations, despite its potential benefits.
Sustainability metrics also fall short, according to the survey. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) remains the standard for measuring energy efficiency, but it obscures improvements in newer facility designs. Many operators lack comprehensive data on crucial metrics like water usage, renewable energy consumption, and carbon emissions. This gap is especially concerning as global regulatory requirements tighten.
The next layer of complexity involves staffing shortages. High vacancy rates remain despite targeted recruitment efforts, with the most pronounced skills gaps in electrical, mechanical and junior level operations roles. The regional nature of skills shortages makes the problem a tricky one to address with North America and Europe failing miserably in their search for trained junior-level operators whilst China and the Middle East lean more towards finding seasoned managers.
Even with these challenges, data center reliability is improving relative to the increase in IT capacity. While very expensive and attention-grabbing, outages are typically less critical. The problem is big outages still break the bank – more than half of respondents.
The datacenter industry is continuing to change, forcing operators to juggle increasing cost and technological skepticism with emerging demand – all within the watchful eyes of regulators.
