Women, Workforce, and the Retrofit Race: The Trends Set to Define UK Data Centres in 2026
Claire Keelan, Managing Director UK, Onnec
As 2025 draws to a close, the UK’s data centre sector has firmly established itself as the backbone of the UK’s AI ambitions.
Major investments from Google, Nvidia and Microsoft, combined with government targets to boost the economy by up to £400 billion through AI-driven productivity, have placed AI infrastructure at the heart of national strategy. But conservative projections suggest the UK will need five times more capacity by 2029 to meet AI demand. This is a huge leap for an industry that, just a decade ago, was still transitioning to the cloud.
To understand how the sector reached this point – and where it’s heading next – it’s worth looking back at the challenges that defined the 2010s and still persist today, the trends shaping the industry next year, and the decade ahead.
The 2010 Landscape: Cloud Compute and the Race for Reliability
At the start of the 2010s, the industry faced a familiar set of pressures. Capacity and power weren’t yet the big concerns. Instead, it was cost, complexity, and reliability. Data centres were struggling to keep pace with unpredictable workloads, rising energy bills, and fragmented legacy infrastructure.
The rise of cloud computing changed the equation entirely. As Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models took hold, businesses realised they could scale faster and cheaper. By the early 2010s, AWS and Microsoft Azure had shifted IT from capital intensive fixed infrastructure to on-demand utility style services.
That shift sparked the virtualisation tipping point, when virtual servers outnumbered physical ones for the first time. Enterprises needed agility to handle the surge of mobile users, social media data, and the first wave of connected devices.
The big data explosion made storage and analytics the next frontier. Suddenly, the question wasn’t just how to store information, but how to extract value from it. In response, operators embraced converged infrastructure – uniting compute, storage, and networking under single management frameworks. But as systems became more sophisticated, a growing skills gap began to emerge, with demand for trained engineers and technical specialists starting to outpace supply.
2026 Trends
Fast forward to today and many of these issues still persist. The same focus on efficiency, sustainability, and skills that shaped the 2010s continues to define the sector today. Only now, the challenge has scaled. In 2026, these age old pressures will collide with new ones, from the need to modernise legacy sites to the race for skilled, flexible talent.
New drivers are emerging to reshape the workforce, infrastructure, and geography of UK data centre delivery. Here are four trends set to redefine the data centre industry in 2026:
1. The data centre ‘gig economy’ backbone of delivery
Flexible labour models will underpin almost every new data centre project. Traditional staffing can’t scale at the speed AI demands. By 2026, flexible, crowdsourced, project-based teams will fill critical gaps across design, building, and operations. This shift isn’t about replacing expertise, it’s about redeploying it. Clear standards, accreditation, and safety frameworks will make flexibility viable at scale, turning part-time professionals and returning workers into a reliable, high-quality talent engine.
2. Women become central to meeting capacity targets
With women making up less than 8% of the current workforce, the imbalance is holding the sector back. In 2026, diversity will shift from talking point to operational priority. This means targeted recruitment, retraining programmes, and mentorship networks designed to bring more women into engineering, safety, and leadership roles. Diversity will be treated as a business resilience issue, not just a social goal. This is because the industry can’t meet AI’s demands while sidelining a sizeable portion of its potential workforce.
3. AI growth zones redraw the map
Regional “AI growth zones” will emerge as the new engines of capacity. In 2026, Manchester, South Wales, and Scotland will continue to gain momentum thanks to lower land costs, renewable energy access, and close ties to academic institutions. This regional diversification will help balance power use and strengthen resilience against local constraints. The days of London and the M4 corridor as the single dominant hub are fading; the future of data centres is distributed, collaborative, and regionally connected.
4. Retrofitting becomes a reality check
With the UK home to one of the world’s largest portfolios of legacy data centres, next year operators must prove how fast they can innovate to stay ahead in the new AI landscape. In 2026, we’ll see a surge in retrofitted data centres as operators rush to upgrade legacy sites to meet soaring AI demand. Power and cooling will be complex, but cabling and network capacity will be the real bottlenecks. Poor-quality or overcrowded cabling limits density, throttles performance, and makes future upgrades almost impossible. Smart operators will invest early in high-grade structured systems that support modular expansion and long-term flexibility. “Retrofit-ready” will become the new benchmark for responsible, future-proof design.
2030: Scaling Smarter, Not Just Bigger
Looking ahead, the UK is targeting 6 GW of AI-capable data centre capacity by 2030, alongside a 20% increase in total sites. The scale of expansion will be unprecedented, and so will the expectations:
- Energy efficiency: Operators will need to blend renewable power with new innovations such as liquid cooling, waste-heat reuse, and on-site energy storage. The focus will shift from “using less” to “using smarter”, matching energy demand to AI workloads and local grid conditions.
- Design adaptability: The pace of AI model evolution means static facilities risk becoming obsolete within years. Modular designs capable of scaling power, cooling, and compute density will be key. Facilities built in 2030 must also be prepared to host technologies that don’t even exist yet, such as Quantum computing.
- Workforce resilience: A diverse, highly trained workforce will be essential to sustaining safety and quality at speed. Deeper partnerships between industry, government, and education will be essential to keeping the talent pipeline flowing.
Why Responsible Scaling is Key
The story of the past decade has been one of transformation. But the next chapter will be about scaling, and how the UK balances rapid growth with sustainability, standards, and people. But building faster isn’t enough. The challenge is to build smarter, cleaner, and more inclusively.
The UK has the investment, the ambition, and the demand. What it needs next is a strategy that connects infrastructure, workforce and skills into one cohesive plan. Only then will its data centres truly power the AI era, not just in 2026, but well beyond it.
About Onnec
Onnec is a leading Infrastructure Solutions and Services company for tech and enterprise, specialising in structured cabling, managed services, and network solutions. Our team of experienced designers, project managers, and engineers, supported by world-class vendor partnerships, delivers top-tier services and solutions.
Onnec’s expertise spans all data centre environments and can support customers with:
- Structured cabling design and installation
- Installation of cabling, ODFs, PDUs and containment solutions
- Network hardware installations, changes and support
- Connectivity and equipment upgrades and changes
- Smart Hands support services
