Uptime Institute says off-premises IT now leads corporate workloads

Uptime Institute off premises findings show a new threshold for corporate infrastructure: third-party facilities now host 46% of enterprise IT workloads, ahead of the 44% still running in company-owned data centers. The shift, reported in Uptime Institute’s Global Data Center Survey 2026, matters for cloud providers, colocation operators and enterprise infrastructure teams because it marks the first time outsourced sites have taken the larger share.

The survey covered more than 800 data center owners and operators across multiple countries. Uptime said more than half of respondents, 52%, were in North America and Europe. The remaining 10% of enterprise workloads are not in dedicated data centers, according to respondents, but in IT rooms and server cabinets.

How much corporate IT is off premises now?

Uptime Institute said 46% of enterprise IT workloads now run in third-party facilities, compared with 44% in enterprise-owned corporate server farms. The firm expects the third-party share to rise to 48% by 2028, while the self-owned data center share remains flat and smaller IT rooms and server cabinets lose ground.

That forecast suggests the next phase is less about a rapid retreat from owned data centers than a continued squeeze on informal or smaller infrastructure footprints. For operators selling colocation, managed infrastructure and cloud capacity, the gain is incremental but durable if Uptime’s projection holds.

Rack power density is rising, but most sites are not AI-scale

Uptime also found that typical rack power density has moved above 11 kilowatts for the first time. The firm attributed the increase to a gradual refresh toward more powerful server hardware, with the average also lifted by a limited number of newer high-density facilities running racks above 30 kW.

Uptime cautioned that the most attention-grabbing AI infrastructure figures are not representative of most data centers. Without the small number of high-density facilities skewing the average, typical rack density is 7.8 kW, up only slightly from 7.5 kW in 2025.

Most facilities still do not have any racks at or above 30 kW, according to Uptime. Even so, 24% of respondents now report having some racks in that category, up from 19% last year. The increase was concentrated in the 50 kW-plus range, including some AI and GPU deployments in racks configured above 100 kW.

Uptime said newer servers can improve workload capacity and energy performance, but those gains come with higher total system power requirements when the infrastructure is fully used. That is the practical constraint behind much of the industry’s AI buildout talk: dense compute is limited by power delivery, cooling, site design and local grid conditions.

Refresh cycles, outages and staffing remain pressure points

The survey also said some operators are moving to technology refresh cycles of less than four years. Uptime noted that, if accurate, this would run counter to the approach taken in recent years by hyperscalers including Microsoft, Google and Meta, which have extended some server lifecycles to six or seven years to reduce depreciation costs.

On reliability, Uptime reported improvement for the sixth consecutive year. The share of respondents that experienced an outage in the past three years fell by three percentage points. The firm warned that several outage drivers are worsening, including unstable or constrained power availability, local grid reliability, supply chain issues and extreme weather.

The financial cost of failures is still climbing. Uptime said 71% of respondents reported that their most damaging outage cost at least $100,000, up from 57% a year earlier. The firm attributed the increase to organizations’ growing dependence on digital infrastructure.

Labor remains another constraint. The largest reported skills gaps were electrical roles and junior operations roles, each cited by 38% of respondents, followed by operations management at 35% and mechanical roles at 34%. Uptime said 53% of operators are having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs, up from 46% last year.

Uptime’s survey points to a market dealing with the same set of bottlenecks in sharper form: power, people, equipment costs, capacity forecasting, power availability and supply chain disruption. AI-related infrastructure is adding pressure, but the broader story is that corporate IT is moving further away from owned facilities while the infrastructure left behind gets denser and more expensive to operate.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.