Why Enterprise AI Infrastructure is Going Hybrid – and Geographic

The Cloud Repatriation Nobody Expected: Why Enterprise AI Is Pulling Compute Back from the Cloud The original pitch for cloud computing was simple: stop buying servers, rent someone else's. For most workloads over the past fifteen years, that trade worked. But AI infrastructure has rewritten the economics, and enterprises are responding by doing something few predicted — they're moving compute closer to the data, not further away. A recent DataBank survey found that 76% of enterprises plan geographic expansion of their AI infrastructure, while 53% are actively adding colocation to their deployment strategies. This isn't a minor adjustment. It's a structural shift in how organizations think about where AI workloads should run. The Economics Changed Before the Strategy Did Running inference on a large language model in a hyperscaler region costs real money. Not "line item you can bury in OpEx" money — more like "the CFO is asking questions in the quarterly review" money. GPU instance pri