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Data center teams are skilled at solving familiar problems such as storage outages, missed forecasts, and late refresh cycles. These are known quantities. Teams have playbooks for them. But 2026 has brought a different kind of pressure. After years of enterprise AI investment concentrated almost entirely on model training, the industry has crossed a threshold: the workload that now defines AI infrastructure isn’t building models. It’s running them. Continuously. At scale. Every day.

AI runs on data, and global enterprises are awash with petabytes of data. That might suggest that it’s easy for companies to advance their businesses through the power of AI. Yet enterprise data is often fragmented across departmental and technological silos, and that data is often inconsistent, ungoverned and disconnected from mission-critical systems. As a result, many AI initiatives stall before they can deliver operational value, and the root cause is rarely the model.

Hybrid cloud was meant to simplify IT — but for many organizations, it has done the opposite. As data spreads across on-premises systems, multiple clouds and edge environments, complexity (not flexibility) has become the defining challenge. With AI initiatives now dependent on distributed, high-quality data, this complexity directly impacts performance, governance, and cost. The lack of a unified view and thereby management of data is the biggest issue spurred by complexity.

For years, enterprise infrastructure treated security, storage, networking, and compute as mostly separate operational layers. Disruptive technologies tend to blur those lines. We saw this with backup and recovery, virtualization, and now with AI.