New research from UK colocation data centre provider Asanti shows that AI adoption, resilience pressures and rising power costs are reshaping data centre strategies for UK organisations, with material implications for managed service providers (MSPs), cloud providers and infrastructure partners.
In a survey of 100 senior IT decision makers, nearly half (48%) said AI adoption will have a large influence on their IT infrastructure strategy over the next three years, ahead of regulatory change and hybrid or multi-cloud capabilities. IT leaders report average rack densities of 8kW per rack today, rising to 11kW within 12 months, as AI-heavy workloads and high-density compute drive up power and cooling requirements.
Rising power costs are already the top concern regarding current data centre environments, cited by 52% of respondents, ahead of maintaining uptime (48%).
Over the next three years, rising energy costs (34%) and sustainability commitments (33%) sit alongside AI, resilience and regulatory change as core inputs to infrastructure strategy.
Stewart Laing, CEO, Asanti, stated:
“AI has moved from pilot projects to production workloads and with it comes a step-change in rack density, power demand and cooling requirements. Organisations are realising they need the right mix of facilities, partners and architectures to deliver compute and storage requirements without compromising on resilience, sovereignty or cost control.”
Resilience and sovereignty drive hosting decisions
Over the next 12 months, cybersecurity and resilience are the most common focus for infrastructure investment, cited by 51% of IT leaders.
In response to cyberattacks and service disruptions in 2025, organisations are:
- strengthening security controls (60%)
- creating backup strategies across multiple data centre providers/locations (50%) and
- reviewing business continuity planning (42%).
A third (33%) plan to move more workloads into on-premise or colocation environments to strengthen their IT resilience.
Location decisions are becoming more polarised, with 30% of organisations already using data centres outside the UK and a further 24% planning to do so, while 32% say they use only UK-based data centres. The research suggests a push pull between cost and sovereignty: high UK power costs draw some workloads overseas, but data protection obligations, regulatory exposure and latency considerations keep others anchored in UK facilities.
Stewart Laing continues:
“For MSPs and infrastructure partners, the opportunity is to help customers design architectures that balance the needs of today, sovereignty, compliance and resilience with AI ambition. That increasingly means hybrid strategies that combine UK-based colocation for critical workloads with selective use of overseas capacity and public cloud where it makes sense.”
Opportunity for MSPs and infrastructure partners
The study shows strong and sustained demand for external expertise.
More than half of organisations (54%) already use third parties for cybersecurity services, while around a third bring in external partners for infrastructure audits (35%), disaster recovery and business continuity planning (33%), and end-to-end solution deployment (35%).
Looking ahead over the next 12 months, organisations expect to increase their use of external support for public cloud repatriation (32%) and technical scoping for new projects (31%), signalling a shift toward more intentional workload placement and right sizing.
“As power, AI and sovereignty concerns collide, few organisations can carry all the skills they need in house. MSPs, systems integrators and specialist data centre providers have a critical role in helping enterprises architect for higher densities, navigate cross border data complexity and build resilient multi site infrastructure that can withstand disruption,” concludes Laing.
The Research: From Misconception to Momentum: 2026 Trends for the UK’s Data Centre Sector, is available here.
