The critical digital infrastructure sector continues to experience strong growth driven by surging demand for IT and the rise of AI. However, this growth presents significant challenges that will shape the industry in 2025 and beyond. This report explores these challenges and their implications, including the evolution of AI hardware, on-premises and cloud-based strategies for training and inference, innovations in power distribution, growing public opposition to new data center developments and the need to collaborate with power companies to address grid limitations.

Introduction

At the beginning of each calendar year, Uptime Intelligence compiles a short list of trends or predictions that will be relevant to the digital infrastructure sector for the year (and years) ahead. These lists aim to highlight crucial, yet often overlooked industry topics, which encourage a closer examination. Our five predictions for 2024 have proved to be largely accurate and will remain relevant for 2025. These are summarized in Table 1.