Partner POV | How High-Density Colocation powers enterprise AI at scale
In this article
Article written by Kyle Chien, Sr. Director, Platform Innovation, Digital Realty.
For over 20 years, Digital Realty has designed and operated some of the most complex, power-intensive data center infrastructure environments. A heritage built on supporting the largest hyperscale cloud providers requires solving challenges that many enterprises are only now beginning to encounter. From extreme power density and advanced cooling requirements to globally consistent IT architectures and connectivity capable of supporting massive workloads.
These lessons became the foundation of PlatformDIGITAL®, one of the world's largest globally interconnected data center platforms designed to support the most demanding digital workloads.1
Today, the same infrastructure principles that enabled hyperscalers to scale globally are becoming essential for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) deployments. A recent survey by McKinsey found that 88% of organizations are using AI in one or more of their business functions, and over half in 3 or more functions. We're seeing this critical shift emerging where AI is moving from being a purely experimental, localized, or cloud-dependent tool to a ubiquitous, integrated, and operational part of mission-critical applications and functions.
Organizations are driving the next phase for AI at scale—deploying and running AI models in production, fine-tuning models for specific use cases, and creating inference and insights for real-time decision-making.
The challenge is that many legacy digital infrastructure environments weren't built for the demands of AI. Digital Realty's High-Density Colocation (HD Colo) solution is designed to serve as a bridge between the current enterprise infrastructure stack and the performance requirements of their AI-driven innovation goals.
Enterprise AI at scale demands more
AI workloads demand significant compute and power density. Training and inference environments rely on GPU-accelerated clusters that generate far greater power requirements than traditional servers ever intended.
According to our Global Data Insights Survey, 84% of Data and AI Leaders are tying data location strategy to their AI road maps.2 Many modern AI applications operate in real-time. Fraud detection systems, supply chain optimization platforms, financial modeling tools, and customer experience engines increasingly depend on low-latency data transfer, processing, and rapid decision-making.
Finally, infrastructure must be deployed quickly enough to keep pace with AI development cycles. Organizations can't afford to wait years to expand data center capacity while competitors continue to innovate.
Traditional IT infrastructure is falling short
Many organizations already operate data centers that support core business systems. However, a large portion of enterprise facilities were built more than a decade ago, when workloads, power density, and data growth followed very different patterns. Modern digital infrastructures solve for very different, often more complex business needs.
As a result, these traditional environments increasingly face three major capability limitations.
- Power density: Modern AI clusters demand far greater power density than legacy data centers were designed to deliver. AI training or inferencing environments can require dramatically more power per rack than traditional enterprise workloads.
- Cooling constraints: Cooling systems in older facilities can often struggle to manage the thermal loads generated by AI and HPC environments.
- Cloud proximity: Legacy data centers are often located far from major cloud ecosystems. As enterprises adopt hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures, the physical distance between data, applications, and cloud services can introduce latency, cost, and operational complexity.
Many organizations are therefore looking for a balanced, hybrid infrastructure environment. One that keeps critical data secure and accessible locally while maintaining proximity to major cloud and AI ecosystems.
Digital Realty's High-Density Colocation (HD Colo) solution is designed to offer that balance.
High-Density Colocation: Purpose-built for deploying AI and HPC workloads
Our HD Colo solution is designed specifically to support dense compute environments while delivering the scalability, security, and network connectivity that enterprises require.
Power architecture drives deployment
HD Colo is designed to support densities scaling up to and beyond 150 kW per cabinet, for GPU-accelerated deployments. Redundant power infrastructure at the facility, hall, and pod levels support dual-corded rack configurations that help ensure continuous operation for mission-critical workloads.
Advanced cooling for AI
Power density alone isn't enough to support AI workloads. Traditional air-cooling approaches typically support densities of 5-15kW per rack, while modern AI clusters frequently exceed those thresholds. This makes advanced cooling approaches essential.
We can support a range of advanced cooling technologies designed specifically for high-density deployments, including Air-Assisted Liquid Cooling (AALC) and Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC). These approaches remove heat far more efficiently than traditional air-only systems, which can support dense GPU environments while maintaining stable operating conditions.
Advanced cooling strategies can also help enterprises meet sustainability and operational efficiency goals. By managing heat more effectively, organizations can achieve high performance while reducing energy waste and optimizing their digital infrastructure footprint.
Scalability supports business goals
Enterprises often begin with a limited AI deployment and expand rapidly as new applications emerge. HD Colo environments are designed to support deployments ranging from individual racks to multi-megawatt installations. This enables organizations to scale infrastructure as their AI strategies and ambitions evolve. We partner with a broad range of the world's leading hardware, software, cloud, and network providers in an open ecosystem that can help achieve desired business outcomes.
Security and compliance ensure resilience
Security and compliance remain central to enterprise infrastructure decisions. Digital Realty facilities incorporate multi-layer physical and operational security controls and support global compliance standards. Standards include:
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
- System and Organization Controls (SOC)
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Together, these capabilities create an environment where enterprises can deploy AI and HPC workloads with confidence and without the need to design, build, and operate specialized infrastructure yourself.
Optimize performance with low-latency connectivity
Performance at this level also depends on how quickly data can move between systems, applications, and cloud environments.
PlatformDIGITAL provides low-latency connectivity to major cloud providers, enabling enterprises to deploy hybrid architectures that combine enterprise data, cloud services, and high-density compute environments.
Cloud-adjacent colocation allows organizations to process data closer to where it resides while maintaining direct access to multiple cloud ecosystems. As data volumes grow, this proximity becomes increasingly important. Data Gravity naturally attracts applications, services, and infrastructure toward locations where large datasets reside, making strategic placement of compute and connectivity critical.
Deployment speed is another critical advantage. Many organizations have already invested in AI hardware but lack the facilities and infrastructure capable of supporting the power and cooling requirements needed to operate it.
Our pre-engineered HD Colo environments can enable enterprises to deploy AI infrastructure in as little as 16 weeks, accelerating time-to-token for AI deployments.
Why enterprises choose Digital Realty
Our HD Colo capabilities are built on decades of experience supporting the most complex hyperscale infrastructure deployments.
By solving the challenges of large-scale cloud environments—extreme power density, advanced cooling, and global connectivity—our infrastructure foundations are built to directly benefit enterprise AI deployments.
PlatformDIGITAL extends this expertise through globally standardized infrastructure designs, consistent service levels, and access to one of the industry's most interconnected ecosystems of cloud providers, networks, technology partners, and service platforms.
This combination can enable customers to deploy infrastructure quickly, scale deployments globally, and maintain consistent performance across locations.
For organizations navigating the transition to AI-driven operations, that level of infrastructure expertise provides a critical foundation for long-term success.
Building the infrastructure for enterprise AI
The next phase of enterprise AI will not be defined solely by algorithms or models, but by the infrastructure platforms capable of supporting them at scale.
Organizations that can deploy high-performance environments quickly, efficiently, and closer to the data can gain a significant competitive advantage.
Digital Realty's HD Colo solution combines a 20+ year heritage of complex deployments, the latest advanced cooling techniques, and the largest globally interconnected platform.