Businesses finally seeing AI ROI, but 62% can’t handle

What happened

Artificial intelligence is forcing organizations to evaluate increases in data storage like never before, but less than 40% of businesses believe their infrastructure is equipped to handle the expansion, according to new research from Seagate Technology. Seagate Technology’s 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report found that 99% of IT leaders expect AI to increase their organization’s storage needs over the next three years.

According to Seagate’s findings, investments in data centers are moving higher on organization priority lists. Just over three out of four organizations (76%) ranked data centers among their top three infrastructure investment priorities, with one out of five even identifying it as their single highest priority. The data center debate is getting a lot of attention, with fights against data centers popping up around the country.

Regardless, the industry’s push for more investment into storage will likely continue, though it’s not the only factor preventing businesses from feeling fully prepared. Immature AI strategies, limited budgets and resources, and data management and governance challenges were also identified by survey respondents as significant barriers to their organization’s preparedness.

While data centers and other forms of AI infrastructure have ruffled the feathers of many towns, cities, states, and individuals, Seagate’s report indicates that sustainability and energy are influencing how organizations shape, plan, and expand their AI infrastructure. Of organizations surveyed, 77% said they had delayed or restructured AI infrastructure expansion due to sustainability or energy concerns, with 36% admitting they had significantly revised expansion plans as a result.

Seagate defines this critical need for continued investment in data strategy, government, and AI infrastructure as a new imperative, which thre company calls sustainable scaling. “Sustainable scaling is the ability to increase AI capacity and business value while continuously improving the efficiencies of the infrastructure that supports it,” according to the report.

Why it matters

In fact, 32% anticipate their storage demand will grow by more than 50% as a result of AI. Despite this, only 38% of organizations say they are prepared to meet AI’s growing data demands. That’s less than four out of ten. Seagate’s findings, published on September 14, are based on a survey of 2,712 enterprise technology decision-makers across the US, China, India, the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.

Recon Analytics conducted the research on behalf of Seagate during May and June 2026. The survey aimed to examine respondents’ perspectives on their organizations’ AI readiness, infrastructure investment, storage architecture, infrastructure efficiency, sustainability, and long-term infrastructure planning. , storage) needed to support it. In recent years, the AI conversation has stubbornly centered on computing power.

Now, businesses and organizations across the globe are increasingly encountering challenges in how data sourced from AI is accessed, stored, retained, and commanded. The most commonly reported challenge to deploying AI among respondents is data quality and readiness, cited by 53% of respondents. The runner-up is storage infrastructure, cited by 43% of respondents.

These two roadblocks are reported at significantly higher rates than others, such as compute availability (27%) and energy constraints (24%). The increased push for more robust infrastructure arrives as some businesses obtain measurable returns from AI. Seagate’s report details that 86% of organizations are seeing “moderate or significant” returns on their AI investments, with one-third reporting “significant measurable” returns.

As AI creeps into more business operations and setups, the data supporting those systems is becoming a longer-term business asset, and the industry knows it. Nearly every respondent of Seagate’s survey (98%) agreed that AI is transforming the seemingly basic component of storage into a strategic element of business infrastructure. And with more storage comes the need for more places to house it.

What to watch

AI-associated energy consumption was the top environmental concern, with 52% of respondents indicating so, followed by carbon emissions and energy use at 51%. Ninety-seven percent of respondents also agreed that extending the usable lifecycle of infrastructure can improve sustainability, and 94% anticipated their storage operations becoming more sustainable within the next five years.

” Seagate anticipates that the next phase of AI will create more data, but capacity alone will not determine which organizations succeed. ” And while this work may already be underway for 38% of organizations, for most, the gap between being mostly prepared and fully prepared remains wide.