AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center platform, today announced that Blackfuel has selected Digital Realty’s BCN1 data center in Barcelona as the foundation for deploying and scaling its AI inference platform.
Built on liquid-cooled Dell Technologies AI Factory infrastructure and AMD GPUs, the deployment brings together substantial dedicated AI capacity, Digital Realty’s global PlatformDIGITAL® ecosystem and ServiceFabric®, the company’s software-defined interconnection platform. Open by design, Digital Realty’s platform supports the full range of AI infrastructure stacks and accelerator architectures across its global ecosystem, giving customers the flexibility to deploy AI where and how it best supports their workloads.
The core of the collaboration is the integration of Blackfuel’s inference platform with ServiceFabric®, enabling AI services to be delivered across Digital Realty’s connected ecosystem, closer to the enterprise applications, data and users they are designed to serve.
Rather than requiring organizations to move large volumes of data across public environments to access AI capabilities, the combined solution brings inference closer to where data already resides. Delivered through private connectivity, ServiceFabric® provides a low-latency, low-jitter network path that can help reduce Time-to-First-Token (TTFT), improve perceived response times and support faster completion of agentic AI workflows, while giving enterprises greater control over security and data flows.
For agentic workflows requiring 20 to 50 sequential inference API calls, reducing TTFT by 50 milliseconds through ServiceFabric®’s optimized network latency can shorten overall task completion time by 1 to 2.5 seconds compared with public internet connectivity. At the scale of millions of tasks per day, these incremental gains can translate into significant efficiencies, highlighting the importance of low-latency connectivity alongside inference performance.
By connecting directly to ServiceFabric®, Blackfuel can reach enterprises, cloud providers, networks and digital ecosystems across Digital Realty’s global platform, creating a scalable route for customers to consume high-performance AI inference within the environments where their digital operations already take place.
“The next infrastructure layer will be built around tokens. With Digital Realty and ServiceFabric®, we are building the foundations of Blackfuel’s AI Token Grid: dedicated inference capacity with global reach and local control, connected to where enterprises’ data and applications live. Barcelona is our first step toward a much larger ambition: making reliable AI capacity available wherever businesses need it,” said Blackfuel.
Today, ServiceFabric® extends across more than 800 Digital Realty and third-party data centers worldwide, giving Blackfuel a global connectivity fabric through which it can scale AI services beyond Barcelona while supporting more deterministic access to distributed enterprise data sets, tools and applications. This helps transform AI from an Internet-accessed service into an enterprise-grade platform, improving responsiveness, governance and the ability to scale adoption across business-critical use cases.
“The next phase of AI will be measured in useful tokens per megawatt and delivering them takes more than compute alone. It takes power, cooling and connectivity working together as one platform.” said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty. “By bringing Blackfuel’s inference platform onto ServiceFabric®, enterprises can reach high-performance AI services on the same connected ecosystem where their applications and data already live. Barcelona is the first proof point, and we’re excited to help Blackfuel scale from here.”
About Digital Realty
Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation, from cloud and digital transformation to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 55+ metros across 30+ countries on six continents. To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and X.
About Blackfuel
Blackfuel is an inference-focused neocloud co-founded by Charles Kantor, Xavier Fischer and Dali Kilani. Its founding team brings experience across frontier AI, model quantization and cloud software. The company combines dedicated accelerator infrastructure, proprietary software and long-term commercial commitments to build and operate AI compute at scale. Its platform serves dedicated capacity and managed inference needs, with European deployments forming the foundation for global expansion.
For Additional Information
Rémi Andreassian
Digital Realty
+33 1 53 56 69 23
randreassian@digitalrealty.com
Investor Relations
Jordan Sadler / Jim Huseby
Digital Realty
+1 (737) 281-0101
InvestorRelations@digitalrealty.com
Media Contact
Blackfuel
comms@blackfuel.ai
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements which are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially, including statements related to the company’s strategy, expectations, AI infrastructure demand, the capabilities and benefits of PlatformDIGITAL®, ServiceFabric®, and other Digital Realty offerings, anticipated performance, scalability and availability of AI-related solutions, expected benefits of Digital Realty’s collaboration with Blackfuel and other technology providers and customer demand for company’s products and services. For a list and description of risks and uncertainties, see the reports and other filings by the company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
