Data Driven Transformation: Unblocking AI’s Boundless Potential

Digital Realty has been recognised by Acquisition International magazine as Best Business Data Solutions Firm 2023 – UK, for its extraordinary capabilities in bringing companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data centre platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data centre footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 27 countries on six continents.

The data revolution is in full swing, and AI is the key to unlocking its potential. At Digital Realty, we believe that our data centres are more than a just place where data is stored – they are a meeting place where companies come together, and form connected data communities. We’ve seen data centres become the central nervous system of the global digital economy, and it’s essential that we’re ready to support our customers with the evolving potential of data. This includes harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), which is set to disrupt industries in ways we are only beginning to understand. The key, as always, is to be on the right side of disruption.

By 2025, the amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide is forecast to reach To put that into perspective picture a stack of CDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back, repeated thousands of times. We call this data explosion ‘data gravity’ – the phenomenon where data accumulates and attracts more data, additional services, and applications. It’s a colossal reservoir of information, representing the immense volume of digital knowledge and insights that are being generated and stored in today’s data-driven world.

Data has become the invisible thread that holds our digital economy together, and there’s growing awareness of its importance. Our Data Gravity Index, DGx™, which measures, quantifies, and predicts the intensity of enterprise data growth for Global 2000 enterprise companies, predicts that by 2024, businesses will create data at a rate of 1.4 million gigabytes per second. Unlocking the value that’s trapped within this data is a key priority for enterprises of all sizes, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to do.  After all, data is the foundation of intelligence, and intelligence is what drives the world forward in new ways – from helping to tackle the climate crisis to the development of life-saving vaccines.

“We are seeing a shift in our customers’ priorities, as the digitalisation of the world continues,” Amanda Sehmar, Director of Global Brand Strategy and Communication, states.

Sehmar continues, “This shift requires an approach that is both global and local, where customers can deploy their data where they need to, with on-the-ground expertise to support them locally.

“When data is generated, it is exchanged across a global data centre platform – we call this a data meeting place – and innovation comes to life. Think of all the technological advancements we enjoy today that have been developed because of data: evolutionary AI, autonomous driving, robotic surgery.”

Ultimately, AI is nothing new. Initially it came about in the form of machine learning, then deep learning, and now generative AI, so businesses have been working with it for some time, including us. As a result, we’ve had a roadmap in place geared towards supporting our customers for several years already, which we’ve evolved and refined along the way thanks to our customers and partners.

Since its inception, we’ve seen the opportunities of AI as a primary driver of next-generation data centre requirements. As a result, we’ve aligned our offerings to meet these emerging demands. We understand that our customers need an AI-ready global data centre platform which has been purpose-built to deploy and scale innovation and drive business value.

Big data analytics, for example, requires a specialised infrastructure environment due to specific hardware and data processing requirements. Power density requirements for AI can be five to 10 times higher than traditional data centre functions, which has subsequently emphasised the need for more innovative mainstream cooling methods, like liquid cooling.

Our solution? A range of state-of-the-art tools to build optimised AI architectures and the ability to digitally engineer deployments in virtual environments. Digital Realty’s data centre designs contain modularity and large capacity blocks to support legacy and high-density AI deployments, all interconnected with ServiceFabric™, our global, purpose-built network fabric.

This new global service orchestration platform, developed in-house at Digital Realty, allows us to provide a new level of service to our worldwide customer base. ServiceFabric™ can pull together network connectivity service elements from multiple sources, including those from Digital Realty and our partners, to create the end-to-end service combinations customers need to fulfill their technology needs with connected data communities and support their business goals.

The evolution of AI, from machine learning to deep learning, to the rise in generative AI, all crucially hinge on data. That’s why our focus at Digital Realty is to support our customers with their evolving and growing data, and ensuring that our customers can efficiently store, analyse, and extract value from their data by providing the meeting place where companies, technologies, and data come together.