Cockroach Labs 2026 AI Report Finds AI Scale Is Pushing Enterprise Infrastructure Toward Failure

The survey was conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research among 1,125 senior cloud architects, engineers, and technology executives across North America, EMEA, and APAC between Dec. 5 and Dec. 16, 2025. It sheds light on the critical need for organizations to recognize their vulnerabilities, prepare for the benefits and drawbacks AI brings, and fortify their operational resilience.

AI Scale Is Redefining the Risk of Failure
Resilience has long been one of the hardest challenges for mission-critical systems. As AI moves into always-on production, leaders increasingly see scalability, not recovery, as the defining constraint. Unlike previous technology shifts, AI introduces persistent, machine-driven activity that compounds continuously, placing unprecedented stress on data architectures and compressing failure timelines from decades into just a few years.

That shift is already reshaping executive expectations. 83% of leaders believe AI-driven demand will cause their data infrastructure to fail without major upgrades within the next 24 months, and 34% expect failure within the next 11 months. For many enterprises, infrastructure failure related to AI scale is no longer a distant risk—it's viewed as imminent.

The financial impact underscores the urgency. 98% of companies say one hour of AI-related downtime would cost at least $10,000, and nearly two-thirds estimate losses exceeding $100,000 per hour, reflecting how tightly availability, performance, and business outcomes are now linked. As AI success accelerates, leaders are confronting a new reality: systems must be built to withstand continuous, machine-driven scale—not just recover from isolated failures.

Key Highlights from the Report Include:

• AI growth is seen as guaranteed. 100% of respondents expect AI workloads to grow in the next year. More than 60% predict increases of 20% or more. The survey results underscore the point that AI adoption is no longer optional – it's an inevitability. The only question is how existing systems will respond to the volume and velocity of what's coming next.
• AI may drive a meaningful number of outages. AI-related reliability issues are no longer hypothetical. 77% expect AI to drive at least 10% of all service disruptions in the year ahead.
• The database layer is emerging as a critical point of failure. Nearly a third (30%) of respondents identified the database as the first point of failure in an AI-overload scenario, second only to the cloud infrastructure (36%) itself.
• Leadership misalignment is accelerating the risk. The survey showed organizations understand the benefits AI can deliver: 99.6% of companies are prioritizing investment in improving AI scalability and database performance in the next year. Still, nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) say their leadership teams underestimate how quickly AI demands will outpace existing data infrastructure. This suggests that while companies have been investing in AI, the investments have been too reactive, and may not truly prevent disaster.

"What the data shows is that AI doesn't just add load—it changes the scale systems have to survive," said Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. "Leaders aren't worried about whether AI works. They're worried their infrastructure won't hold up once AI is always on. At that point, resilience isn't about recovery—it's about whether the architecture can handle continuous success without breaking."

CockroachDB: A Single Operational Foundation for AI at Scale
While the report highlights a growing readiness gap, it also points to what "AI-ready" infrastructure looks like in practice: a single operational foundation that can remain consistent under high concurrency, stay available through failures, and scale elastically as AI workloads surge. As organizations move from prototypes to production agents, many are finding that stitching together separate systems for transactions, vector search, and agent state introduces fragmentation and operational complexity—especially when AI traffic is always on.

CockroachDB is built for that reality. As a globally distributed SQL database, it delivers resilience and scale together—without manual sharding—while supporting modern AI patterns that unify operational data, vector embeddings, and durable agent state in one system. The result is a simpler, more consistent architecture that can keep pace as machine-driven workloads move from early experiments to mission-critical production.

For more insights and recommendations on how AI scale is reshaping infrastructure limits and what systems need to withstand next, please download the full report here.

And for more information on CockroachDB, please visit: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/

ABOUT COCKROACH LABS:
Cockroach Labs is a pioneering software company at the forefront of database technology, dedicated to delivering resilient and scalable database solutions to run mission-critical workloads for the world's most important businesses. The company's clients include Form3, Hard Rock Digital, and Shipt, Fortune 50 global financial institutions as well as retail and media industry leaders. With a mission to scale when others fail, Cockroach Labs is revolutionizing the way businesses manage their data with its innovative cloud native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

SOURCE Cockroach Labs, Inc.