Infrastructure is becoming a system-of-systems
A Deloitte survey of infrastructure leaders across 21 countries shows infrastructure convergence is reshaping how governments plan, govern, and invest in infrastructure
The distinction between physical and digital infrastructure is rapidly disappearing. Transportation networks, power systems, water utilities, communications infrastructure, public facilities, and the built environment are typically planned, governed, and funded through separate institutional structures. That approach is becoming difficult to sustain as infrastructure systems become more interconnected and dependent on one another.
Physical assets depend on digital platforms, sensors, connectivity, data, and operational technologies to function. At the same time, digital infrastructure depends on reliable power, communications networks, and other physical infrastructure to operate. As these interdependencies deepen, decisions made within one infrastructure system affect capacity, performance, and risk across others.
Deloitte’s 2026 Future of Infrastructure Survey (see “About the survey”) highlights a growing recognition of this shift, with respondents broadly emphasizing the need to better understand dependencies across infrastructure assets, sectors, and geographic locations.
About the survey
In March 2026, Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights surveyed 985 infrastructure executives across government, private sector, and not-for-profit organizations in 21 countries to understand how leaders are approaching infrastructure investment, delivery, resilience, financing, and artificial intelligence. The report identifies five shifts shaping the future of infrastructure. Taken together, they show how infrastructure is evolving from individual assets to interconnected systems and what this shift means for governments and infrastructure leaders (read the full methodology here).
As infrastructure systems become more interconnected, governments need greater visibility into how decisions for one system affect outcomes across others. That visibility enables more coordinated planning, investment, and operations across organizational and sector boundaries and ultimately requires governments to plan, govern, and operate infrastructure as an interconnected system rather than a collection of independent assets.
The digital-energy nexus is one of the clearest examples in the survey of this emerging system-of-systems model. As AI, connected assets, and digital services drive demand for power and connectivity, modern energy systems depend more heavily on digital controls, analytics, and real-time data. Similar interdependencies are emerging across infrastructure systems, reshaping how governments manage data, technology, assets, institutions, and partners as part of a single interconnected ecosystem.
Digital capabilities are connecting infrastructure systems
Digital capabilities embedded in physical assets are accelerating infrastructure convergence. Across energy systems, transportation networks, the built environment, and social infrastructure, respondents expect digital technologies to fundamentally reshape how infrastructure is built, operated, and experienced. These capabilities are being embedded by design, although their role differs across infrastructure domains (figure 1).
What the survey tells us:
- 69% of surveyed respondents expect demand for smart, connected, and resilient urban infrastructure to have a significant impact on infrastructure, with European respondents reporting the highest expectations (75%).
- 66% expect greater integration of digital technologies in social and entertainment venues, with Latin American (82%) and Asia-Pacific (80%) respondents reporting the strongest expectations.
- 59% anticipate adoption of advanced technologies in infrastructure and transportation operations will have significant impact on infrastructure, with North American respondents reporting the highest level of anticipated adoption (67%).
Infrastructure systems are not becoming digital in identical ways, but their performance now depends on a shared digital foundation, including data, connectivity, controls, and analytics.
That shared digital foundation is also changing how infrastructure is managed. Scheduled inspections and reactive maintenance have given way to real-time intelligence that enables infrastructure operators to monitor conditions, optimize performance, and respond more quickly to changing circumstances. This shift is being enabled through capabilities such as command-and-control systems and digital twins.
The Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands illustrates what this shift looks like in practice. The port’s digital platforms bring together data on port infrastructure, water, weather, vessel movements, and terminal activity to support decision-making across a complex public-private logistics ecosystem.1 This gives port authorities greater visibility across systems, improving coordination, safety, and reliability, which in turn helps optimize individual quays, vessels, or terminals.2
The survey suggests that organizations have moved beyond foundational use cases such as predictive maintenance toward broader operational intelligence capabilities. Increasingly, the goal is not simply to monitor individual assets, but to improve the coordination and management of infrastructure systems. Real-time monitoring, performance optimization, energy forecasting, and operational coordination are emerging as central operational priorities (figure 2). (See Chapter 5 for a deeper dive into AI use cases.)
What the survey tells us:
- Predictive maintenance remains the most widely implemented AI use case today (61%). Its projected decline over the next three years likely reflects the maturity of these applications as organizations shift their focus to newer AI use cases, rather than a decline in interest.
- Real-time asset monitoring and performance optimization currently ranks third (46%). Looking three years ahead, real-time asset monitoring is expected to become the leading operational AI use case (45%).
- Other AI use cases expected to grow over the next three years are those that rely on real-time intelligence and deeper operational insights, including energy demand forecasting (44%), traffic management and mobility optimization (38%), AI-enabled workforce optimization (38%), and grid management (35%).
The goal is to create infrastructure systems that continuously sense, analyze, and respond to changing conditions. This shifts the focus from monitoring individual assets to understanding how conditions across connected systems affect service delivery.
Smarter, connected infrastructure requires system-level visibility
Today, infrastructure dependencies are everywhere. Power disruptions can affect communications and transportation. Transportation systems rely on cloud platforms and digital controls. Water utilities depend on sensors and operational technologies. Digital infrastructure needs reliable power generation, connectivity, and energy storage. Together, these interdependencies are reshaping infrastructure planning and decision-making. The survey indicates that respondents recognize cross-system interdependencies as a defining characteristic of modern infrastructure planning (figure 3).
What the survey tells us:
- The respondents recognized a strong need to better understand dependencies and interconnectivity of infrastructure assets across sectors and geographic locations, with 45% identifying this as a defining characteristic of modern infrastructure planning.
- Recognition was highest among APAC (49%) and Latin American (47%) respondents, although no region fell below 42%.
However, these dependencies go beyond technical integration. Connected infrastructure creates value by bringing together data from across infrastructure systems, giving leaders a broad view of how decisions in one domain affect others. A disruption or policy decision in one domain can reshape demand, capacity, risk, and service quality across several others. These dependencies also cross institutional boundaries. Public infrastructure relies on private-sector capabilities and capital, while private infrastructure depends on public utilities, permitting, public transport, water, and other shared resources.
In Singapore, Virtual Singapore integrates data on buildings, mobility, utilities, and infrastructure into a shared digital environment.3 Agencies can test how changes in one system—such as transport routing or drainage design—affect other infrastructure systems, reducing surprises and improving coordination. Over the years, Singapore has also built the Digital Urban Climate Twin, which integrates data on vegetation, traffic patterns, industrial heat emissions, and weather-related data to simulate the impact of the built environment, urban parks, and mobility patterns on urban heat islands.4
As infrastructure systems become more interconnected, failures that begin in one system can cascade into others, requiring infrastructure leaders to shift from asset-level planning to system-level planning.
The digital-energy nexus is the most visible interdependence today
One of the clearest examples of infrastructure interdependence identified in the survey is the relationship emerging between digital infrastructure and energy systems, which we call the “digital-energy nexus.”
Digital services, connected devices, and advanced infrastructure technologies are driving significant increases in electricity demand. At the same time, expanding energy systems rely more heavily on digital technologies to manage generation, storage, forecasting, and grid operations. The relationship is reciprocal: Each system depends on the other (figure 4).
The digital-energy nexus illustrates how demand created in one system changes capacity requirements, investment choices, operating risks, and resilience risks in another. The same pattern is emerging across infrastructure systems, including mobility and land use, water and energy, and public facilities and transportation access.
What the survey tells us:
- 69% of the respondents expect demand for smart, connected, and resilient infrastructure, including the proliferation of connected devices and Internet of Things will have a significant impact on infrastructure.
- 64% expect that exponential growth in electrification and AI solutions will fuel rapid growth in energy demand. Latin American respondents believe it is the defining interdependence of this era (79%).
Viewed together, these demand- and supply-side trends highlight the growing interdependence between digital infrastructure and energy systems. The survey points to simultaneous growth in connected infrastructure, AI-related demand, connectivity, alternative energy sources, and storage. Meeting this demand will require coordinated growth in connectivity, energy capacity, and energy storage. The challenge is to expand capacity while ensuring supporting infrastructure grows at the same pace as demand (figure 5).
Beyond humanoids?
Humanoid robots capture public imagination with their familiar bipedal form. Where do we go from there?
In terms of physical form factors, boundary-pushing engineers are increasingly experimenting with machines that blur biological lines. Imagine robots powered by living mushroom tissue, those that mimic movements using rat muscle tissue, or machines that can transition between solid and liquid states using magnetic fields. In innovative laboratories today, scientists are integrating living organisms into mechanical systems, developing robots that can navigate complex environments through multiple modes of locomotion, and creating machines that adapt their physical form to match the task.30
Quantum robotics—the combination of quantum computing and AI-powered robotics—also holds promise, though it’s still in the very early stages. Superposition, entanglement, quantum algorithms, and other quantum computing principles could allow robots to operate at speeds that are impossible for today’s binary computers.31 Quantum algorithms are expected to improve processing, navigation, decision-making, and fleet coordination, while quantum sensors will enhance perception and interaction.32
Useful quantum robots are expected to be many decades away. Hardware immaturity, integration challenges, and the extreme sensitivity of quantum states are just a few of the challenges that must be solved before quantum computing can be widely deployed.33
Humanoid butlers are at least a decade away, and exotic form factors and quantum capabilities remain largely experimental. But they represent a fundamental shift in how we think about robotics. As these breakthrough technologies graduate from the lab to the enterprise to the home, the field of robotics is moving beyond simply automating human tasks toward creating entirely new categories of machines.
What the survey tells us:
- The biggest demand is on expanding and strengthening foundational connectivity infrastructure (68%): high-speed, reliable, and universal connectivity through multiple technologies, including fiber-based wired broadband, low earth orbit satellites, and 5G.
- A corresponding demand can be seen in foundational energy infrastructure, with a specific focus on alternative sources of energy (64%) and a significant growth in energy storage solutions (62%).
- APAC respondents expressed the strongest expectations for these demand-side developments, particularly for alternative energy sources.
Infrastructure interdependence delivers better outcomes when leaders understand how systems interact, coordinate decisions across organizational boundaries, and align investments around shared outcomes. While the survey highlights the digital-energy nexus, the same need for coordinated planning extends across transportation, water, communications, public services, and the built environment.
When digital infrastructure, energy systems, energy storage, and connectivity networks are planned together, they reinforce one another, creating more efficient infrastructure systems that can support economic growth and sustain future infrastructure investment.
Coordinated planning is critical as infrastructure systems converge
Infrastructure is becoming more connected, intelligent, and interdependent. The opportunity is to create a system-level visibility, governance, and coordination needed to understand how decisions in one domain affect outcomes across many others.
A system-of-systems approach should ultimately be judged by public outcomes, not technological sophistication alone. For governments, the opportunity is significant: more efficient, intelligent, and responsive infrastructure systems that deliver better outcomes at lower long-term cost. Capturing that opportunity requires planning, governing, and investing in digital, energy, transportation, and public infrastructure as parts of a single interconnected system.
BY
Anant Dinamani
Mahesh Kelkar
Dr. Thomas Schlaak
Tiffany Fishman
Editorial (including production and copyediting): Kavita Majumdar, Pubali Dey, Aparna Prusty, and Cintia Cheong
Design: Natalie Pfaff and Harry Wedel
Cover image by: Natalie Pfaff and Jim Slatton
Knowledge Services: Rohan Singh
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