The critical digital infrastructure sector continues to thrive in a period of economic uncertainty. Further opportunities and growth are expected in 2023 and 2024, but owners and operators are also likely to face some difficult and expensive challenges. This report discusses some of these potential issues, including supply chain disruption, power and cooling requirements for powerful next-generation IT hardware, growing wariness of public cloud, pressure on IT functions to address their energy footprint and strong inflationary pressures.

Introduction

At the beginning of each calendar year, Uptime Institute highlights a short list of trends — or predictions — for the immediate year (and years) ahead. In our selection, we aim to direct attention to vital yet less obvious industry topics that invite deeper consideration. Our predictions are thought-provoking, rather than safe. For 2022, we highlighted five trends that have largely borne out and continue to be relevant for 2023. These are summarized in Table 1 and are explained in more detail in the Appendix.