Partner POV | Beyond Experiments: How Digital Realty & WWT Are Building AI That Scales

Article written by Willington Lordelo, Director, Platform Innovation, Digital Realty. 

At Digital Realty, we are committed to helping enterprises navigate the complex journey of AI adoption, transforming experimental pilots into scalable, business-critical solutions.

Our latest Leadership Lounge, held on-site at World Wide Technology (WWT)'s North American Integration Center near St. Louis, brought together two leading technology visionaries: Chris Sharp, our Chief Technology Officer, and Mike Taylor, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Services at WWT. This dynamic discussion provided a behind-the-scenes look at the practical steps and insights that can empower businesses to harness the full potential of AI.

5 Key Takeaways from the Leadership Lounge

Move beyond "science projects" to real outcomes

Every enterprise experiments. The real differentiator is whether those experiments evolve into outcomes that matter. As Mike Taylor observed, "Science experiments often turn into some of the most impactful things within the business. The key is connecting ideas from the ground with executive sponsorship, so they become real outcomes."

That alignment of bottom-up innovation with top-down leadership is where the breakthroughs happen. Chris Sharp noted that enterprises often struggle to operationalize great ideas, which is why trusted partners are so critical: to help organizations avoid "shelfware" and instead engineer solutions that deliver measurable business impact.

Equally important, evolving from experimentation to execution isn't just about speed—it's about efficiency. By connecting innovation with clear business objectives early, organizations can test smarter, fail faster, and reach meaningful outcomes at a lower cost.

Pre-Integration and Digital Twins Accelerate Time to Value

In an era where time-to-market can define competitive advantage, enterprises cannot afford to reinvent the wheel. "At Digital Realty, we aim to make the data center a place where integration is already solved — pre-engineered for AI, connectivity, and performance, so customers can focus on outcomes, not infrastructure assembly," Chris explained.

Mike pointed to the power of digital twins in managing complexity: "It's nearly impossible for any one person to manage all the variables in a system build or ongoing maintenance. Digital twins use real-time data from the physical environment to create virtual models, giving us visibility into how those variables interact for monitoring, analysis, and simulation. This helps us move faster and with more confidence."

By combining pre-integration with simulation, organizations can deploy AI infrastructure quickly while minimizing risk.

Design Once, Deploy Many

Standardization is becoming a cornerstone of enterprise AI. WWT integrates over 1,000 fully assembled racks each month for customers across industries, and as Mike noted, "We were doing factory things before 'factory' was the word. Pre-configured components let customers move faster with quality and consistency."

This "design once, deploy many" approach allows enterprises to validate environments in controlled settings, then replicate them globally with consistent performance, reliability, and compliance. Digital Realty provides the scalable infrastructure that makes this global standardization possible.

Partnerships Power Progress

No enterprise can scale AI alone. Infrastructure and software must be deployed in the right place, with the right capabilities, and operated with the right expertise. Chris made this point clearly: "If you're not watching the hardware, the software and the power together, you'll get disintermediated."

WWT's long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA demonstrates the value of strategic alliances. "It's not just a hardware platform," Mike emphasized. "NVIDIA's software suite is equally critical, giving customers an 80/20 blueprint to build from."

This is where the data center becomes a differentiator—serving as the foundation that connects partners, workloads, and ecosystems into one operational fabric. It is not about point solutions. It is about ecosystems of partners co-innovating to deliver end-to-end outcomes.

Curiosity and Data-readiness Are the Missing Links

While technology grabs the headlines, culture and data discipline remain the decisive factors. "Curiosity wins in all areas," Mike reflected. "Pair that with enterprise architecture discipline around data, knowing where it is and how it interacts, and you've got the foundation to scale AI."

This resonates with what we see across Digital Realty's platform. Enterprises that invest in data governance, while fostering curiosity to explore new solutions and approaches to emerging challenges, are the ones that move fastest from experimentation to real-world impact.

Looking Ahead: From Experiments to Enterprise Scale

Both leaders closed on a note of optimism. "What excites me most is the momentum," Mike said. "Experiments are turning into reality, and that momentum will only accelerate."

Chris pointed to what comes next: densification, liquid cooling, and infrastructure that can seamlessly support both training and inference workloads across distributed environments.

This is where leadership matters. AI is not simply a new workload. It is a new era of infrastructure and innovation. The enterprises that treat it as a business imperative, rather than a science experiment, will define the next chapter of digital transformation.

At Digital Realty, we are helping shape that future through PlatformDIGITAL®, creating the environment where data, partners, and AI ecosystems can thrive at scale. The question is no longer if enterprises will scale AI, but how quickly they can do so.

Are you ready to move from experimentation to enterprise-scale AI? Watch the Leadership Lounge webinar, From Science Projects to Scalable AI , to hear the full discussion between Chris Sharp, CTO, Digital Realty, and Mike Taylor, CTO, WWT.