Digital Realty backs NextDC, opens Latin American AI lab in global push
What's the deal? Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) has taken a significant equity stake in Australian data centre operator NextDC alongside Goodman GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, while opening its first Latin American Innovation Lab in São Paulo, Brazil. The moves extend the company's AI infrastructure footprint across multiple continents.
What does the company do? Digital Realty is a US-based specialised real estate investment trust (REIT) with a market cap of about $67.2 billion. It runs PlatformDIGITAL, spanning more than 300 data centres across 55-plus metros in over 30 countries.
What's the endgame? The São Paulo lab — joining sites in Northern Virginia, Tokyo, and London — gives customers a live environment to test, validate, and optimise multi-vendor AI infrastructure before deploying at scale. It supports liquid-cooled racks at densities of 150kW and above. Management also plans new labs in Singapore and Johannesburg.
Why now? AI demand is spreading beyond a few large training campuses toward inference, enterprise workloads, and interconnected deployments across more markets. In its latest quarter, Digital Realty reported record leasing bookings of $855 million and a signed-lease backlog it values at roughly $1.9 billion.
Its 1.4-gigawatt development pipeline gives the business a platform to pair global reach with capacity where customers want it. In Japan, the company recently began construction of KIX15, a 24MW facility in Osaka slated to open in the fourth quarter of 2028 through its joint venture with Mitsubishi CorporationDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
"AI infrastructure is evolving at a pace that makes interoperability increasingly complex," said Claude Brown, senior vice president, American sales. Enterprises "need confidence that these components will work together and perform at scale as AI workloads move from experimentation into production."
What could go wrong? The scale of planned investment makes execution, power availability, and funding costs important caveats. For the labs and NextDC stake to matter, investors will watch whether they translate into contracted AI-related bookings and higher utilisation of high-density racks.
The signal: This is a sector-wide buildout, not a DLR-only story — rival Equinix is also accelerating capacity and promoting globally connected AI infrastructure. Digital Realty's approach leans on partners and testbed capacity rather than only building new megawatts on its own balance sheet, betting that helping customers design architectures is where value accrues.
Read more: finance.yahoo.com, Business Insider
Image credit: cbowns
