Uptime Survey Puts Corporate IT Off Premises For First Time

Corporate IT workloads have moved outside company-owned server halls for the first time, The Register reported, citing Uptime Institute's Global Data Centre Survey 2026.

The shift puts third-party facilities ahead of in-house data centres just as racks draw more power and outage costs rise.

Uptime's survey placed 46 percent of enterprise IT workloads in third-party sites, compared with 44 percent in company-owned corporate facilities.

Uptime's survey placed another 10 percent in IT rooms and server cabinets rather than dedicated data-centre halls.

Third-Party Sites Take The Larger Workload Share

The workload split changes the buyer side of the data-centre market.

Enterprises that once treated colocation, cloud and other third-party facilities as extensions of internal estates now rely on those sites for the largest share of their IT placement.

Uptime's survey covered more than 800 data-centre owners and operators across multiple countries, with 52 percent of respondents in North America and Europe.

The 2028 estimate keeps company-owned server halls at their current share while third-party facilities rise to 48 percent.

Uptime's forecast puts the increase in third-party sites at the expense of IT rooms and server cabinets, while company-owned server halls stay level in the estimate.

Rack Density Moves Above 11 kW

Power density is rising at the same time.

Uptime's survey put the average of typical rack densities above 11 kW for the first time.

Uptime's rack-density data also showed a limited group of sites crossing the 30 kW mark; after that group is removed, the average falls to 7.8 kW, compared with 7.5 kW in 2025.

Uptime's density section recorded that most facilities still have no racks at or above 30 kW, while 24 percent of respondents now have some of them, up from 19 percent last year.

Uptime reported that rack-density growth was concentrated above 50 kW and included some AI and GPU server deployments configured beyond 100 kW per rack.

Newer servers can raise workload capacity and energy performance, but higher-powered hardware increases total system power.

Some operators are also pursuing technology refresh cycles of less than 4 years, while The Register contrasted that with Microsoft, Google and Meta efforts in recent years to extend hardware lifecycles to 6 or 7 years.

Outage Costs And Skills Gaps Keep Pressure On Operators

Reliability data improved for a sixth consecutive year, with the outage rate over the prior three-year window falling by three percentage points.

Uptime still identified unreliable power access, local grid weakness, supply-chain limits and extreme weather as rising outage factors.

The cost side moved in the other direction.

Uptime's survey found 71 percent of respondents had six-figure costs from their most damaging outage, up from 57 percent a year earlier.

Skills shortages remained concentrated in electrical roles and junior operations, each cited by 38 percent of respondents, followed by operations management at 35 percent and mechanical roles at 34 percent.

Uptime's staffing data recorded that more than half of operators, 53 percent, had difficulty finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, compared with 46 percent a year earlier.

The survey listed power, staff and equipment prices as the primary financial pressure, with capacity forecasting, power availability and supply-chain disruption also sitting inside the operator constraint set.