Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR) has joined forces with NVIDIA Corporation to accelerate the development of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The collaboration centers on the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX blueprint and the launch of an NVIDIA AI Factory Research Center at Digital Realty’s Manassas, Virginia, campus—one of the world’s largest data-center corridors. The partnership is set to redefine how hyperscale data centers are designed, operated, and optimized for the compute-intensive era of AI model training.
Digital Realty’s announcement marks a strategic shift from its role as a neutral colocation provider toward becoming an active architect of AI-ready infrastructure. The company aims to integrate digital twins, liquid cooling, high-density power distribution, and grid-responsive design as foundational elements of its new facilities. NVIDIA’s Omniverse DSX blueprint, which defines an end-to-end architecture for AI factories, will serve as the framework guiding this transformation.
How the NVIDIA DSX blueprint is transforming the scale and speed of AI infrastructure development
The NVIDIA Omniverse DSX (Data Center eXtreme) blueprint reimagines the data-center lifecycle from construction through operation. By using digital-twin simulations and OpenUSD-based modeling within Omniverse, operators can design, test, and optimize gigawatt-scale AI factories virtually before any concrete is poured. NVIDIA has said the blueprint enables facilities to be replicated quickly, improving deployment speed while reducing energy and material waste.
According to NVIDIA’s engineering teams, the DSX framework divides into three operational pillars: DSX Flex, focused on grid-aware power optimization; DSX Boost, targeting performance-per-watt and thermal efficiency; and DSX Exchange, enabling IT-OT interoperability across compute, power, and cooling systems. These layers collectively transform an AI data center from a static facility into an adaptive, self-optimizing organism capable of learning from its own telemetry.
For Digital Realty, this blueprint represents both a design philosophy and a competitive differentiator. The company plans to apply DSX concepts at its Manassas campus, where the new NVIDIA AI Factory Research Center will act as a live laboratory for power-dense AI workloads. The facility will explore liquid cooling, energy recovery systems, and grid-balancing mechanisms to manage the intense thermal and electrical loads required by GPU clusters such as NVIDIA H200, Blackwell, and Grace Hopper superchips.
Why Digital Realty’s pivot toward AI-optimized infrastructure signals a new era in data-center strategy
The global pivot to AI has forced the data-center industry to rethink its traditional architecture. Historically, colocation facilities were optimized for cloud and enterprise virtualization. AI workloads, by contrast, demand up to 50 kW per rack—several times the density of standard setups—and require advanced liquid cooling to prevent overheating. Digital Realty’s move to integrate NVIDIA’s DSX blueprint indicates that the company intends to be among the first real-estate operators capable of supporting multi-megawatt AI deployments at scale.
Executives from Digital Realty noted that the AI Factory Research Center would help validate new operational best practices and guide the next generation of facility designs. While the company did not disclose capital expenditure details, industry analysts estimate that AI-specific retrofits and new builds could drive its development pipeline beyond the $5 billion mark in North America alone.
The Manassas site, part of the broader “Data Center Alley” in Northern Virginia, is particularly strategic. Its access to abundant grid power, fiber connectivity, and proximity to major cloud regions makes it a logical testbed for AI-specific configurations. If successful, the DSX-aligned campus could become a model for replication across Digital Realty’s 300-plus global facilities.
What investors and analysts are saying about Digital Realty’s alignment with NVIDIA’s AI factory ecosystem
Institutional investors have interpreted the partnership as a signal that Digital Realty is positioning itself as an indispensable player in the AI infrastructure supply chain. Analysts from UBS and J.P. Morgan have pointed out that demand for GPU-dense colocation capacity now outpaces traditional enterprise hosting by more than 4 to 1, creating a race among operators to modernize facilities. In this environment, being NVIDIA-aligned offers a branding and technical advantage that could drive long-term leasing growth.
Digital Realty’s financial performance supports this narrative. In its third-quarter 2025 report, the company posted revenue of approximately US $1.6 billion, up about 10 percent year-on-year and 6 percent sequentially. Its funds-from-operations (FFO) guidance for the full year remains strong, reflecting stable leasing momentum and improving margins on hyperscale deals. Shares of Digital Realty have traded near US $150 in recent weeks, up nearly 20 percent since January 2025, outperforming broader REIT indices that have struggled amid higher interest rates.
Sentiment analysis from Simply Wall St and Barron’s indicates that Digital Realty is increasingly viewed as one of the few real-estate investment trusts directly benefiting from the AI build-out cycle. Over a three-year horizon, the company’s total shareholder return stands at roughly 96 percent. Yet analysts caution that elevated valuation metrics and high capital intensity could temper near-term upside. The bullish thesis remains anchored on Digital Realty’s ability to execute on its AI roadmap while managing debt and power-procurement risks.
How AI factory design is reshaping the relationship between compute, cooling, and the power grid
Gigawatt-scale AI factories represent a new class of infrastructure that blurs the line between data centers and industrial energy consumers. Each large-scale AI facility can draw as much power as a mid-sized city, making grid coordination and thermal management critical. NVIDIA’s DSX Flex framework addresses this by enabling AI factories to behave as intelligent grid participants—modulating consumption in response to energy-market signals or renewable-generation cycles.
Digital Realty’s testbed will explore the potential for AI models to manage their own thermal envelopes in real time, dynamically adjusting workloads and cooling intensity. This convergence of data science, building automation, and energy analytics could redefine how hyperscale facilities interact with utilities. Industry observers suggest that lessons learned from this collaboration could feed directly into federal energy-efficiency standards and influence how other operators approach ESG reporting.
By embracing such adaptive design, Digital Realty hopes to future-proof its assets against both environmental regulation and customer expectations. As AI models continue to scale beyond the trillion-parameter mark, the energy footprint of compute infrastructure is becoming a board-level issue for hyperscalers and investors alike.
Why the Digital Realty–NVIDIA collaboration marks a shift in competitive dynamics for the data-center industry
This partnership signals that data-center operators are evolving from passive landlords into active technology partners. For years, colocation companies sold space and power; today, they are expected to provide integrated compute ecosystems capable of supporting specialized workloads. Digital Realty’s DSX-aligned approach places it in a category with the few operators that can deliver infrastructure designed explicitly for AI, quantum simulation, and advanced analytics.
Competitors such as Equinix, CoreWeave, and DigitalBridge are also investing in AI-optimized campuses, but few have a direct collaboration framework tied to NVIDIA’s architectural roadmap. As AI factories expand globally, standardization around blueprints such as DSX could become as influential as Tier certifications once were for traditional data centers.
Moreover, the partnership allows Digital Realty to diversify its revenue mix. While cloud clients like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud remain core tenants, the rise of enterprise AI, autonomous systems, and synthetic data startups is creating new leasing verticals. Each of these tenants demands compute-dense, inter-connected environments that mirror hyperscale capabilities on smaller scales—a market segment Digital Realty now appears ready to dominate.
What the Digital Realty–NVIDIA alignment reveals about the next phase of AI infrastructure evolution
The collaboration between Digital Realty and NVIDIA demonstrates that AI infrastructure is moving from experimentation to industrialization. By fusing real-estate engineering with high-performance computing design, both companies are laying the groundwork for scalable, repeatable AI factories capable of serving the global surge in model training and inference. The DSX blueprint effectively provides the playbook; Digital Realty provides the real-world laboratory to bring it to life.
From a market perspective, this alignment strengthens Digital Realty’s investment narrative amid a rapidly consolidating sector. Investors are increasingly differentiating between data-center owners who can adapt to AI workloads and those that cannot. Digital Realty’s early partnership with NVIDIA positions it at the forefront of that divide. The company’s ability to translate this technical collaboration into financial performance—while navigating energy constraints, regulatory oversight, and macroeconomic pressures—will determine how much of the AI boom it captures.
As AI demand reshapes everything from silicon design to building architecture, the companies capable of bridging digital and physical infrastructure will define the next generation of global compute. Digital Realty’s integration of NVIDIA’s DSX blueprint is not just a technical upgrade—it’s a statement that the data-center industry itself is entering its AI-native phase.
Discover more from Business-News-Today.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
