Enterprise power play: Inside the transformative Digital Realty + WWT partnership for AI deployment

In this Q&A, technology leaders from Digital Realty and Worldwide Technology (WWT) discuss their partnership to address the unprecedented infrastructure demands of artificial intelligence (AI) computing. With collective visibility into 10,000+ customers globally, Digital Realty and WWT reveal how their combined platform tackles data gravity challenges while future-proofing enterprise digital transformation initiatives.

Jared Stanley
Senior Solutions Architect, Digital Realty

Stanley is part of the CTO organization and responsible for leading strategy, enablement of partnerships, and solution design for PlatformDIGITAL®. Stanley started his career at UUNET and has held leadership positions with service providers over the years. Most recently he was the Global Vice President of Digital Transformation at a consulting firm acquired by Accenture. Today, he supports sales, engineering, and Digital Realty customers in all facets of their IT transformation and journey.

Chris Campbell
Senior Director of AI Solutions, AIaaS, GPUaaS, Facilities, and Infrastructure for WWT

Campbell is responsible for the strategy, development, and delivery of WWT’s AIaaS/GPUaaS solutions and associated go-to-market to WWT clients. Previously, he worked in other senior roles in customer advocacy and engineering at WWT. Campbell also worked in various sales, channel, and product development roles at Choice Solutions, Forsythe Solutions, Red Hat Software, BEA Systems, and USinternetworking/AT&T.

How is Digital Realty prepared to deliver the mixed densities required for AI, hybrid cloud, and interconnection?

Jared Stanley: We’ve spent more than two decades building modular, mixed-density data centers, which allows us to quickly retrofit facilities for whatever power density our customers require. Digital Realty has 170 HPC/AI-ready locations where our customers currently push 50 kW per rack, with air or liquid cooling up to 150 kW. Simply put, we can meet today’s infrastructure demands while future-proofing for tomorrow.

And how is WWT prepared to do the same?

Chris Campbell: WWT has been providing technology solutions to our clients for over 30 years, and we’re well versed in what’s necessary for a modern AI deployment. We offer flexible infrastructure options — including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid models — all with advanced networking and connectivity, a high-performance computing architecture, and edge-to-core cloud integration. WWT also collaborates with industry leaders — like NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, and HPE — to deliver AI infrastructure solutions that are easy to deploy and manage.

Collectively, how does the partnership between WWT and Digital Realty benefit customers and their overall digital transformation initiatives?

Jared Stanley: Time, visibility, and execution. Collectively, we have more than 10,000 customers in various stages and deployments of their digital transformation journeys. Time and time again, I see enterprises meeting with vendors looking to resolve a single problem within their technology stack and not considering the larger goal they want to accomplish. Together, WWT and Digital Realty provide clients with one “unified” open platform that addresses data gravity, enables AI, and provides a future-proofed infrastructure to support whatever comes next. Ultimately, we provide the space, power, cooling, and connectivity but rely on partners like WWT to deliver the rest: AI-ready hardware, a world-class supply chain, and consulting and integration.

Chris Campbell: We have a holistic approach that aligns desired business outcomes and technology solutions to strategic initiatives so organizations can craft experiences that exceed customer expectations. By partnering with Digital Realty, we bring speed-to-market, flexibility, and scalability to our clients. Our expertise, combined with the Digital Realty infrastructure, enables us to provide enterprises with the IT infrastructure they need for their digital transformation initiatives. For example, the next generation of AI chips will have more demanding requirements for the data center, like liquid cooling. There are very few in the Fortune 1000 that have a data center ready for this. Digital Realty is ready.

How does the race to adopt AI compare to the race to the cloud we’ve seen in the past 5–7 years? Is it real or overhyped?

Jared Stanley: There are certainly similarities. Cloud laid the foundation for AI. Today, sustaining large language models requires data and compute resources at a scale that only the cloud can deliver. The hyperscalers, many of which sit within Digital Realty facilities, provide customers with marketplaces and ready-made sandboxes to pilot potential use cases.

Chris Campbell: There are also some crucial differences. The cloud adoption race had clear and tangible benefits, with many organizations successfully leveraging cloud services to enhance their operations. We’re just beginning the journey with AI projects and seeing how they can provide businesses with advantages. I’m optimistic about the positive impact of AI, but how we build and run AI projects in 3–5 years will be different than how we approach it now. And the infrastructure requirements are significantly higher for AI: massive amounts of power, high density, and liquid cooling.

How have the massive amounts of new data and current market conditions impacted your customers?

Jared Stanley: Digital Realty developed the Data Gravity Index™ (DGx 2.0) to predict the intensity of data gravity so customers can make strategic decisions about where to place and connect infrastructure and data sets. Along with this data, WWT and Digital Realty help customers design and deploy edge-to-core infrastructure in our global facilities within an ecosystem that provides additional services to create a comprehensive solution for data gravity.

Chris Campbell: To add to that, there are security and compliance considerations, especially with AI projects. To help with this, our clients implement robust cybersecurity measures and ensure compliance with data sovereignty and regulatory requirements to protect sensitive information.

Your companies have joint visibility into 10,000+ customers around the globe. What are some common issues you resolve for them?

Jared Stanley: Every customer is different, but hybrid and converged architectures seem to be the direction most enterprises will take over the next 5–7 years. This data collaboration is the essence of PlatformDIGITAL®, our global data center platform, which provides AI workflows with the highly dense environment needed and scales businesses globally while solving data gravity. With enterprise AI adoption, we’re seeing the growing need for performant access to private data. ServiceFabric™ provides connectivity across our global data centers and cloud providers, integrating an open ecosystem of partner offerings. Additionally, our partnership with WWT enables us to prevalidate our customers’ IT ambitions and deliver prevalidated designs. Together, we help our customers tap into possibilities they couldn’t realize by themselves.

Chris Campbell: Security is always the No. 1 concern, but data and AI have crept up as an issue in our customer survey this year. To help organizations prove their AI initiatives, we’re investing over $500 million in our AI Proving Ground environment with multi-vendor reference architectures where customers can test workloads and equipment. With enterprise CIOs’ investing so much in a technology that’s rapidly becoming so pivotal, having partners like WWT and Digital Realty to provide the expertise and infrastructure required gives them a big leg up over their competitors.

Learn more about the Digital Realty and WWT partnership and how to make your enterprise AI and data ready