Digital Realty's First EMEA Innovation Lab Opens in London

Anyone building AI infrastructure today faces the same question: what happens when theory meets reality?

That is the challenge Digital Realty is aiming to solve with the launch of its new Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in London.

Located inside one of the company’s Docklands campuses, the facility gives enterprises and technology partners a place to test AI and hybrid cloud infrastructure before committing millions to full production rollouts.

The opening marks the first DRIL site in EMEA and follows earlier launches in Northern Virginia and Tokyo.

But the London location carries particular weight.

Sitting beside one of Europe’s busiest interconnection hubs, the facility arrives as enterprises grapple with complex AI deployments that demand far higher power densities and tighter links between cloud environments.

AI infrastructure moves from theory to deployment

Digital Realty says the London DRIL has been designed to replicate real production conditions, allowing customers to test workloads, cooling strategies and infrastructure configurations before deployment.

That includes cabinets supporting workloads of more than 150kW alongside access to the company’s ServiceFabric and Private AI Exchange (AIPx) platforms, which underpin interconnection and distributed AI services across its campuses.

Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty, says the economics behind enterprise AI deployments are changing rapidly.

“The economics of AI have shifted,” he explains.

“Enterprises are moving from training-led pilots to distributed, inference-led production, and the bottleneck is no longer model capability, it's infrastructure design.

“Winning architectures will be private, hybrid, and openly interconnected, and that's exactly what London can now prove out in our lab – workloads validated end-to-end across ServiceFabric and our Private AI Exchange (AIPx) before a single switch is flipped in production.

“London is one of the densest interconnection points in Europe; bringing DRIL here gives EMEA enterprises a place to engineer AI that actually pays back.” 

The DRIL is intended to show how multi-vendor architectures behave under production-style loads, especially where hybrid cloud and private AI deployments intersect.

The focus on testing reflects a growing pressure on operators to deliver reliable AI performance without making expensive changes later.

Why London became DRIL’s first EMEA home

The decision to place the first EMEA lab in London also highlights the city’s continuing role as a strategic connectivity hub for hyperscalers, enterprises and cloud providers.

AI inference workloads need to sit close to users and data sources, especially when latency-sensitive applications are involved.

At the same time, enterprises are spreading deployments across multiple metros and cloud environments instead of relying on a single location.

That complexity is creating fresh demands on interconnection-rich campuses capable of supporting hybrid architectures at scale.

Digital Realty believes the DRIL gives customers an opportunity to work through those operational challenges before infrastructure is rolled out more broadly across the region.

Séamus Dunne, Managing Director at Digital Realty UK and Ireland, says: “Our customers in London and across EMEA are moving fast on AI, and they need infrastructure they can rely on from day one.

“The DRIL is how we help them get there, by turning concepts into tested, deployable solutions before any major capital is committed.” 

This also reflects a broader trend across the data centre sector, where operators are offering more consultancy, validation and deployment support alongside traditional colocation capacity.

Expansion plans beyond Europe

Digital Realty plans to open additional facilities in Singapore, São Paulo and Johannesburg in 2026, expanding the network across key global connectivity markets.

As AI deployments continue to reshape infrastructure requirements, operators are under pressure to help customers reduce deployment risk while accelerating production timelines.

Digital Realty's latest launch positions London not just as another colocation market, but as a proving ground for the next generation of AI-ready data centre infrastructure.