Investment in data centres is expected to rise in 2025, with cloud providers dedicating significant financial resources to expanding facilities to support cloud services and AI-driven applications, according to GlobalData, a data and analytics company.
GlobalData’s latest report, “2025 Enterprise Predictions: Data Center,” reveals that this year, colocation providers like Equinix, Vantage, NTT, Digital Realty, and Vertiv will continue growing driven by increasing demand for AI services by customers in numerous industries. These companies are expected to expand their real estate using economies of scale to scout increasingly harder-to-find data centre locations.
Beatriz Valle, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Technology and Services at GlobalData, commented, “Enterprises will continue to resort to colocation providers to deploy their AI infrastructure rather than build their own facilities. This eases the complexity associated with deploying and operating AI-driven workloads at scale and outsources any liabilities associated with the upkeep of the data centres .”
GlobalData predicts on-premises workload deployments will endure, and a massive cloud exodus remains elusive. Although most organisations continue to migrate workloads to the cloud to benefit from digital transformation and application modernisation initiatives, it is now becoming apparent that some workloads are not designed for cloud computing deployments.
Valle noted, “Put simply, some critical workloads in specific industries are not designed for the cloud. Industries managing particularly sensitive data, such as finance, healthcare, life sciences, and some government sectors, face up to so much complexity, that it is not worth the trouble. In addition, some geographies have stricter regulation and compliance, creating the need for data sovereignty.”
On-premises will continue to offer certain advantages, such as greater security, control, integration with existing IT operating systems, and lower latency for applications requiring quick data access. In addition, financial considerations like unpredictable fees will mean that on-premises will continue to prove resilient going forward.