Insights / Research Report / The Critical Role of Storage in Building an Enterprise AI Infrastructure
September 12, 2025

The Critical Role of Storage in Building an Enterprise AI Infrastructure

Simon Robinson
Principal Analyst, Storage & Converged Infrastructure

Emily Marsh
Associate Research Director

Market Topics

Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence

As mainstream organizations continue to adopt AI technologies and applications, they increasingly understand the effects of these technologies on the underlying infrastructure. Though the immediate focus of many AI infrastructure projects is understandably on the compute layer, the data-intensive nature of AI also suggests that it will make a significant impact on the enterprise storage environment. However, with the AI space evolving at such breakneck pace, the precise nature and extent of these impacts has been unclear. IT leaders are faced with questions such as: Will AI workloads predominantly run on premises or in the public cloud? What type of data will these workloads primarily run on? What are the data- and storage-related challenges that will crop up across the various stages of the AI lifecycle? Who will best drive the storage decision-making for AI?

To gain further insight into these trends, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 350 IT professionals at organizations in North America (U.S. and Canada) involved with or responsible for purchase and deployment decisions for enterprise storage.

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