AI Infrastructure Gaps Have Become Major Adoption Hurdle
Forty percent of organizations now report inadequate specialized infrastructure, up from 9 percent in 2024.
Updated on Oct. 7, 2026 in Data Centers
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A 2026 survey of 2,131 IT leaders found that 40 percent of organizations view a lack of specialized infrastructure as their primary AI adoption challenge. This figure represents a sharp increase from 9 percent in 2024, signaling that hardware and networking constraints are hindering enterprise AI initiatives.
Why it matters
The shift highlights a growing disconnect between ambitious AI software roadmaps and the underlying physical hardware required to run them effectively. Businesses are now pivoting toward private clouds and sovereign AI models to bypass these limitations and reach efficiency goals.
Digital Realty reported that 40 percent of organizations now identify infrastructure gaps as a blocker, a significant rise from 9 percent in 2024. Currently, 50 percent of surveyed IT leaders are hosting AI models in private clouds to maintain control over their hardware environments.
The players
Digital Realty
A global provider of carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions.
The details
The survey indicates that 92 percent of enterprises are linking their data-location strategy directly to their AI plans, reflecting a need to move computation closer to data sources. Furthermore, 88 percent of organizations have adopted a distributed-data approach to manage the growing complexity of these workloads. These strategies are increasingly coupled with sovereign AI initiatives, now being explored by 86 percent of respondents, to ensure data residency and regulatory compliance.
Timeline
2024: Nine percent of organizations cited infrastructure as an adoption challenge.
Nov. 23, 2025 - Feb. 4, 2026: The period during which the Digital Realty survey was conducted.
October 2026: Survey results were published.
The Tech Race
This data marks a significant shift from previous years where software availability dominated the conversation. It underscores a competitive race where the ability to provide specialized, sovereign-ready infrastructure has become the primary differentiator for data center operators.
IT teams are currently moving toward private cloud hosting to bypass existing infrastructure bottlenecks. Leaders expect this transition to yield measurable efficiency returns within a window of six months to two years.
The takeaway
Organizations are increasingly prioritizing infrastructure and data-sovereignty alignment to overcome the rising hurdles of AI integration. Stakeholders should monitor the 63 percent of organizations currently tracking AI returns to identify which infrastructure configurations yield the fastest cost reductions.
Further reading
For more on the current state of physical compute deployment, see our Data Centers section.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Campus Technology.
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