2025 marks a shift: Data sovereignty and AI drive the next phase of edge deployment
The edge computing market is maturing, with 2025 as the tipping point for how stakeholders think about deployment, AI workloads and infrastructure models, according to research by STL Partners.
Highlights from the report show a significant change in the discourse on edge computing. While conversations in the past were heavily focused on low latency use cases, with the release of this new data we can see that data localisation led by regulatory and sovereignty concerns is becoming the number one edge adoption trigger, especially in on premise deployments.
Cost and complexity are significant barriers, with almost 60% of respondents citing them as the biggest obstacles to broader enterprise deployment in all types of edge cases.
As for AI, the survey suggests edge infrastructure is becoming a key enabler of inferencing, with model training expected to remain mostly centralized. Highly sensitive verticals such as defense and healthcare will dabble in federated learning. Over 60% predict accelerated hardware like GPUs will be the norm for most edge deployments by 2030.
By industry vertical, manufacturing maintains its position at the front in both edge adoption (on-prem) and its tie to operational technology (OT) systems.
The survey ran from July to September 2025 and drew responses from 100+ edge experts at operators and software vendors who provided a strong picture of current sentiment and future predictions. The final edge computing survey report is available now.
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