Datacentres of the future will be built differently, says Gartner

“The datacentre of the future is not just built differently. It is justified, approved, operated and governed differently.”

That’s according to Henrique Cecci, senior director analyst at Gartner, who made the case ahead of the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona this week. For CIOs, he said, the strategic implication is clear: “Datacentre decisions made today must be flexible enough to adapt to the world they will still operate in 20 years from now.”

His argument comes as artificial intelligence (AI) providers prepare to spend nearly $1tn on AI infrastructure in 2026, with a further $6tn forecast between 2027 and 2030, according to Gartner figures. The pressure is evident in datacentres, where Gartner said power density is set to rise 10 times.

“We used to have five, six, seven, eight kilowatts per cabinet. And today we have more than 10, 12 or more kilowatts. Eventually, we’ll have 250 kilowatts per cabinet and more,” Cecci said.

He set out three priorities for CIOs. The first is workload placement – matching each workload to the datacentre that suits it. “At startup, cloud makes total sense, but a large enterprise with all the legacy may be a different mix,” he said.

The second is to secure capacity and energy commitments early. “We have to plan and get commitments in advance because we may not have enough resources eventually,” he said. Colocation vacancy rates are very low, he added, and costs will tend to increase in the coming years.

The third is regulation and sovereignty. “We have increasing regulatory requirements, in terms of energy, water, noise, heat, use and many other things in sustainability,” he said. “We need to have those numbers to show. Sovereignty is a growing trend also.”

Gartner groups the pressures reshaping the datacentre into four forces:

1. Market economics
2. Power and technology
3. Regulation and social licence
4. Geopolitics and sovereignty

Its research says $130bn of projects were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026, and that datacentre electricity demand will climb toward 1,218TWh (terawatt-hours) by 2030. Its strategic planning assumption holds that, through mid-2027, hardware costs for general-purpose datacentre servers will run 50% to 125% above mid-2025 levels.

Cecci said the response should be datacentres that are more power-aware, redesigned for mixed-density and liquid-cooled zones, distributed by sovereignty and community acceptance, modular and approval-ready. He pointed to modern datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools and digital twins that let operators model what-if scenarios and predict anomalies. The upshot is that power availability, not network connectivity, now decides where a facility goes.

Datacentre decisions made today must be flexible enough to adapt to the world they will still operate in 20 years from now

Geopolitics runs through the analysis. Gartner has said 60% of organisations expect geopolitical factors to increase future use of cloud, and that sovereignty concerns are pushing some towards non-US-owned facilities or their own builds.

Cecci said that despite the hyperscale buildout, on-premises datacentres are still viable. “We don’t have one size fits all,” he said. “A strategically located on-premises facility still makes sense for governments, large banks and large organisations that want to keep part of their processing in-house, for sovereignty and low-latency reasons.”

Edge is the other counterweight to the hyperscale buildout. Inference is growing “more than four or five times more than training”, Cecci said, and modular, prefabricated options are reducing the cost of distributed capacity.

The message lands amid a reshaping of planning and power in the UK. The government published the first draft National Policy Statement for datacentres in October – the committed UK datacentre pipeline has grown to more than 14GW, and ministers want at least 6GW of AI-capable capacity by 2030. Grid connection reform and a pause on large Scottish planning decisions complete the picture.