Digital Realty brings Innovation Lab to London

The London DRIL gives customers and partners a dedicated space to test, validate, and optimise AI and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions in a live data centre environment, before they commit to full-scale deployment.

The launch follows the opening of DRILs in Northern Virginia and Tokyo and reflects Digital Realty's broader commitment to supporting customers at every stage of their infrastructure journey, from initial planning through to production. The DRIL gives customers the ability to test and optimise real workloads under real-world conditions. By enabling hands-on evaluation of infrastructure configurations, customers can validate performance, power density requirements, and cooling strategies before full-scale deployment. That can contribute to fewer surprises at launch and faster time to value. It also enables partner technologies to be deployed alongside Digital Realty infrastructure within the same environment, giving customers a realistic view of how complex, multi-vendor architectures behave under load.

"The economics of AI have shifted. 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,” said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty.

The DRIL sits on one of Digital Realty's Docklands campuses, right next to the City of London and one of the most densely connected points in Europe. Cabinets support workloads up to 150+kW, with direct access to ServiceFabric® and the Private AI Exchange (AIPx), Digital Realty's platforms for interconnection, orchestration, and low-latency distributed AI.

For EMEA enterprises, that matters because the architectures now showing up in production AI aren't simple. Private inference needs to run close to data and users. Hybrid cloud means spanning multiple metros, not just one. And partner ecosystems need to connect over a single fabric rather than being re-wired every time you add a deployment. London is the right place to work through those patterns before rolling them out across the region.

"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,” said Seamus Dunne, Managing Director, Digital Realty in the UK and Ireland. "

Digital Realty’s London DRIL is part of a wider global expansion. The company plans to open further DRIL locations in Singapore, São Paulo, and Johannesburg in 2026, giving customers in key markets local access to hands-on testing and confirmation.