AI is starting to be trusted with high-stakes tasks, including running automated factories and guiding military drones through hostile airspace. But when it comes to managing the data centers that power this AI revolution, human operators are far more cautious.
According to a new survey of over 600 data center operators worldwide by Uptime Institute, a data center inspection and rating firm, only 14 percent say they would trust AI systems to change equipment configurations, even if it’s trained on years of historical data. In the same survey, just 1 in 3 operators say they would trust AI systems to control data center equipment.
Their skepticism may be justified: Despite pouring tens of billions of US dollars into AI systems, 95 percent of organizations thus far lack a clear return on investment, according to a recent MIT report of generative AI usage. Advanced industries, which include factories and data centers, ranked near the bottom of the list of sectors transformed by AI, if at all.
Operator Trust in AI Systems
Even before the AI-driven push to expand data centers, data center operators themselves are known to be a relatively change-averse crowd who have been disappointed by buzzy technologies of the past, says Rose Weinschenk, a research associate at Uptime Institute. Operators often have electrical engineering or technical mechanical backgrounds, with training in the running of critical facilities; others work on the IT or network system side and are also considered operators.
Operator trust in AI declined every year for the three years following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022. When asked by Uptime if they trusted a trained AI system to run data center operations, 24 percent of respondents said no in 2022 and 42 percent said no in 2024. While the public has marveled at the seemingly all-knowing nature of new large language models, operators seem to feel this type of AI is too limited and unpredictable for use in data centers.
But now, operators appear to have entered a “period of careful testing and validation” of different types of AI systems in certain data center operations, said Uptime research analyst Max Smolaks in a public webinar of the latest survey results. To capture changing sentiments, Uptime asked operators in 2025 which applications AI might serve as a trustworthy decision-maker, assuming adequate past training. Over 70 percent of operators say they would trust AI to analyze sensor data or predict maintenance tasks for equipment, the survey shows.
“Data center operators are very, very happy to do certain things using AI, and they will never, never trust AI to do certain other things,” Smolaks said in the webinar.
AI’s Unpredictability in Data Centers
One reason why trust in AI is low for critical control of equipment is the technology’s unpredictability. Data centers are run on “good, old-fashioned” engineering, such as programmed if/then logic, says Robert Wright, the chief data center officer at
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The post “AI Data Center Trust: Operators Remain Skeptical” by Elissa Welle was published on 08/28/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org