Digital Realty Global Data Insights Survey Finds Infrastructure as Top AI Constraint
9th article in the last 90 days, one of 26 articles referencing Digital Realty Trust. Previous coverage: Digital Realty Launches ServiceFabric® MCP, Bringing AI-Native Programmable Control to 800+ Data Centers (Sep 2026).
Companies mentioned
Best suited for
- Seniority
- EVP / SVP / VP / AVP
- Job function
- IT Infrastructure
- Persona
- Data / AI Operations Leader
- Buyer role
- Decision Maker / Budget Holder
- Buyer journey
- Need to Buy
- Adoption curve
- Late Majority
- Technology maturity
- Operational Expansion
- Industry
- Data Center / Colocation & Wholesale Data Centers / Wholesale / Hyperscale Colocation
Our classification, not the publisher's statement. Best suited for, not only for.
Digital Realty released findings from its 2026 Global Data Insights Survey that address how enterprises are preparing for AI deployment. The results describe rising infrastructure and governance challenges as AI investment moves from planning to implementation. For IT leaders, the survey frames how these constraints affect near-term execution priorities.
The survey, based on responses from 2,131 IT decision-makers across 19 countries, reported that 40% identified lack of specialized infrastructure as the primary constraint on AI initiatives, up from 9% in 2024. Respondents also described changes in how organizations manage AI priorities, including attention to operationalizing AI at scale while balancing performance, governance, data sovereignty, and cost control.
Key deployment expectations in the survey included an expected 32% increase in AI spending over the next year and 79% of respondents expecting to deploy AI initiatives in 2026. It also reported that 3% saw no measurable ROI from AI initiatives, while nearly two thirds (63%) expected returns within six months to two years. The findings also included that 98% expected to be running real-time AI applications within 12 months, increasing demand for low-latency connectivity and resilient infrastructure.
The survey described data and compliance factors affecting AI strategies, including that 88% adopted a distributed data strategy and 92% tied data location decisions directly to AI plans, up from 73% in 2024. It also reported that 86% pursued sovereign AI initiatives and that more than 50% hosted AI workloads in private cloud environments. “As organizations move decisively from strategy to execution, one factor emerges above all others as the determinant of success: infrastructure. Legacy data centers, built for a different era, cannot on their own meet emerging requirements for performance, compliance, scale, and security. The infrastructure beneath AI is now the gatekeeper between promise and payoff, and organizations that recognize this will be the ones who lead,” Colin McLean, Chief Revenue Officer at Digital Realty, said. The full report was made available through the Global Data Insights Survey | Digital Realty page.
Press release, provided by Globe Newswire on behalf of Digital Realty Trust. Read the original.