DLR Expands AI Infrastructure Opportunity With Blackfuel Collaboration
Digital Realty DLR is strengthening its artificial intelligence infrastructure capabilities through a collaboration with Blackfuel, which has selected the company’s BCN1 data center in Barcelona to deploy and scale its AI inference platform. The multi-megawatt deployment combines dedicated AI capacity, advanced cooling and private connectivity through Digital Realty’s ServiceFabric platform. The move also comes as peers such as Equinix EQIX and Iron Mountain IRM expand infrastructure designed for AI and accelerated computing workloads.
The deployment uses liquid-cooled Dell Technologies AI Factory infrastructure and AMD GPUs and integrates Blackfuel’s inference platform with ServiceFabric. This setup enables AI services to operate closer to enterprise applications, users and data, potentially reducing the need to move large volumes of information across public networks. This distributed, high-density infrastructure model is becoming increasingly important across the industry, with Equinix also investing in interconnected AI infrastructure and Iron Mountain adapting its data centers for accelerated computing.
Low-latency connectivity is an important part of the offering. Digital Realty notes that cutting Time-to-First-Token by 50 milliseconds could reduce completion times for agentic AI workflows involving 20-50 sequential inference calls by roughly 1-2.5 seconds compared with public Internet connectivity. At high volumes, such improvements could support greater efficiency and faster AI responses.
The collaboration also gives Blackfuel access to Digital Realty’s broader connected ecosystem. ServiceFabric spans more than 800 Digital Realty and third-party data centers worldwide, giving Blackfuel scope to expand its AI inference services beyond Barcelona while maintaining private connectivity to enterprise data and applications. Such connectivity capabilities could help Digital Realty differentiate its AI offering as Equinix continues to scale its own distributed AI ecosystem and Iron Mountain increases its focus on AI-ready data center capacity.
For Digital Realty, the deal reinforces its strategy of combining data center capacity, power, cooling and interconnection services to capture growing enterprise demand for AI infrastructure. With a global footprint of more than 300 facilities across 55-plus metros, the company appears well positioned to support customers seeking distributed, scalable AI deployments as inference workloads become more embedded in business applications.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
