New Iron Mountain research finds reclaimed IT spending enables enterprises to invest in AI technology and infrastructure as refresh cycles accelerate

India:  As businesses invest in technology needed to support AI, new research from Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM), a global leader in information management services, suggests that retired IT assets could help fund what comes next.

Published in Iron Mountain’s new report, The Information Supercycle: Aligning Data, Infrastructure and Capital for AI Scale, the findings show how comprehensive asset lifecycle management (ALM) can help organisations recover value from decommissioned technology and reinvest it in next-generation infrastructure, creating a potential self-funding and sustaining mechanism for AI innovation.

17% of organisations are already using reclaimed IT spending as a source of AI funding, compared with 27% using new capital allocation and 24% drawing on departmental funds.

Industry benchmarks suggest organizations can reclaim 10–30% of initial hardware costs when IT asset disposition is treated as a formal budget recovery program. For a business with more than 5,000 employees, the research models potential reclaimed value of $1.2 million, which could be redirected towards AI-enabled technology.

Erica Hirsch, Senior Vice President, Asset Lifecycle Management at Iron Mountain, said: “The AI investment conversation tends to focus on what businesses need to buy next, but there is another side to the equation. Organizations should also understand what value is sitting in the technology they already own and how that can be recovered as their IT estate evolves.”

Effective ALM takes a holistic view of the technology lifecycle, bringing together asset tracking, secure data destruction, resale and recycling rather than treating disposal as a standalone end-of-life process. As AI accelerates technology refresh cycles, this gives organizations greater visibility and control over how retired assets are managed securely and responsibly.

The sustainability implications are becoming harder to ignore. 71% of organizations are concerned that AI’s energy demand will conflict with ESG or sustainability milestones, strengthening the case for businesses to recover, reuse and responsibly retire technology as their AI infrastructure evolves. Hirsch continued: “AI is changing the economics of the IT lifecycle. The opportunity is to connect technology refresh with capital recovery, security and sustainability, turning the end of one asset’s life into part of the investment case for the next.”