More than half of AI projects have been delayed or canceled within the last two years citing complexities with AI infrastructure, according to a research report commissioned by DDN, a data optimization company in partnership with Google Cloud and Cognizant.

About two-thirds of the 600 IT and business decision-makers surveyed at US enterprises with 1,000 or more employees said their AI environments are too complex to manage.

“If you look at the enterprise, there’s just enormous enthusiasm to deploy AI, but the problem is that the infrastructure, the power, and the operational foundation that is required to run it just aren’t there,” Alex Bouzari, CEO of DDN, told The Register. “And so as a result, it pops up in the financial elements with IT projects getting delayed, the GPUs being underutilized, power costs going up. And so the economics, I think, for lots of organizations don’t pencil out because of these challenges.”

This isn’t the first study that has found AI projects coming up short in the enterprise. MIT’s widely cited Project NANDA found 95 percent of organizations are seeing zero measurable return from their generative AI investments. Gartner predicted that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Forrester found that 25 percent of planned AI spend would be delayed into 2027, as only 15 percent of AI decision-makers reported an EBITDA lift for their organization.