How Digital Realty Redesigned AI Deployment to Accelerate ROI

At Digital Realty, we bring companies, technology, and data together in a very succinct fashion. With PlatformDIGITAL, which is representative of 300-plus data centers, 50 metros, 25 countries, it's a unique environment for our partners and our enterprise customers to really be successful. What we see with AI is representative of a tremendous amount of demand. And so, in that demand, it's great for business, but it's also challenging for a lot of our enterprise customers. The concept of our Digital Realty Innovation Lab came about because of such complexities, not only in hardware but in software, and even the inner networking. We wanted to go one step beyond that digital twin, and provide an environment for our partners and then ultimately our enterprise workloads to come in and be successful— being able to remove the complexity of that science project and guarantee an outcome quicker. That's the core concept of why we brought the DRIL to market. The collaboration we have with Digital Realty around the Innovation Lab is truly exciting. Having a proving ground where we can bring validated technology together with our customers, so they can bring their applications, we can prove them out, we can optimize them together, that's invaluable to what it allows our customers to do. We can improve their time to value and make sure they're getting the maximum ROI on their AI investments. Cisco's new capabilities that they've been honing over the years and being able to bring a unified proven technology set that not only internetworks everything, which is a core component, but then the security and some of the AI capabilities, the culmination of all that is what led us to partnering with Cisco. I think the capabilities that Cisco brings to the table, specifically for AI and what we brought to the partnership with Digital Realty as part of their Innovation Lab, was a fully validated AI blueprint, from compute, network, storage, connectivity, to the AI applications to security. So, putting it all together in a sort of tried- and-true reference architecture, and that becomes the foundation for Digital Realty and Cisco's joint customers to rapidly innovate and experiment with AI applications. We have the full complement of hardware and software needed to make AI real for our customers. So we brought our AI PODs, our Agile Services Networking capabilities with SRv6 and traffic optimization, as well as our AI Defense product and our multi-agent reference architecture to really provide a comprehensive toolkit that they can use to test out and develop AI applications. Another aspect is how we bring these AI PODs to market. AI represents a different challenge for the data centers around that densification. The average rack density today, 6 to 8 kilowatts. What we're seeing with these AI PODs, get 20 to 50 kilowatts. And so having an environment that easily allows that densification of power, all being interconnected in an open platform, that's a very unique capability. A core thing for us at Cisco is how do we help simplify AI for our customers. It starts with AI PODs that are sized for different applications, well-defined reference architectures that are validated for our Cisco Validated Design concept. It's not just about the network infrastructure, it's about the full stack, where we integrate compute, network, storage, our agentic AI application frameworks, AI Defense, security, all of that in a turnkey, validated solution. That becomes the foundation for how our customers can confidently build AI into their next-gen applications, into their workflow, and truly transform their business. What's drawn us to Cisco is just the heritage of networking and the critical foundation that it represents. It's not just about latency, it's about throughput. Because at the end of the day, your AI is only as smart as the data set you feed it, and the networking enables it.