Digital Realty expands Innovation Lab Network to Singapore and Japan

The DRIL in Singapore and Japan comes as Digital Realty continues to expand its presence heavily in the region.

Digital Realty is expanding its Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) into Singapore and Japan. The world’s largest cloud and carrier neutral data center platform hopes the DRIL locations will offer its ecosystem of partners and customers fully supported, real-world testing environments.

Specifically, with the DRIL in Singapore and Japan, partners and customers can bring their own workloads or use pre-configured infrastructure to validate AI and hybrid cloud deployments before scaling live. This is especially important as AI adoption increases, and infrastructure readiness has emerged as a critical barrier to moving from experimentation to production at scale.

With Singapore driving AI adoption and continues growth in its digital economy as well as Japan’s plans to invest heavily in the country’s semiconductor and AI sectors, Digital Realty believes these initiatives will only drive greater need for innovation labs in the region.

Taking a look at the Singapore DRIL, the lab is designed to serve as a digital innovation hub, bringing together local customers, partners, and research institutions with global technology providers and industry participants seeking to develop, test and deploy AI and hybrid cloud solutions in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the DRIL in Japan will be located at the company’s NRT12 data center in the Greater Tokyo area. It is designed to support advanced AI and high-performance computing use cases and will feature 20 racks with direct liquid cooling (DLC) capabilities, enabling support for high-power-density workloads.

According to Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty, sustaining rapidly expanding digital economies requires innovation ecosystems built on infrastructure that is not only AI-ready, but also efficient, resilient, and trusted.

“Since launching the DRIL in the US, we've seen strong demand from customers and partners across Asia Pacific seeking dedicated environments to validate AI and hybrid cloud architectures before deploying at scale. Bringing this capability to Singapore and Japan reflects the digital maturity of these markets and their critical role in shaping the region's long-term digital competitiveness,” said Nah.

Nah added that by creating spaces where enterprises can test, optimize, and de-risk their AI infrastructure, Digital Realty is accelerating responsible deployment and strengthening Asia Pacific’s position as a hub for trusted digital innovation.

The new DRIL locations will enable businesses in Singapore and Japan to test performance, optimize configurations, and seamlessly connect to cloud and network provided by Service Fabric, Digital Realty’s global interconnection and orchestration platform.

The global DRIL network already supports a growing ecosystem of customers and partners, including AMD, Cisco, and Lenovo, focused on scaling AI and hybrid cloud architectures.

Continuous expansion in APAC

The DRIL comes as Digital Realty continues to expand its presence heavily in the region as well. Earlier this year, Digital Realty opened its new Global Command Center (GCC) in Singapore. The center is expected to enhance Digital Realty’s global operational capabilities by integrating a new state-of-the-art facility into its command center.

The new facility will collaborate closely with established command centers in the North, Central, and South America (AMER), Europe, and Africa regions, serving as a central hub for alarm monitoring, incident management, site support and optimizing the customer experience across Digital Realty’s global platform of over 300 data centers.

In December 2025, Digital Realty made its entry into Malaysia as the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions, as it acquired CSF Advisers, owners of the TelcoHub 1 data center.

The data center, which is located in Cyberjaya, will officially mark Digital Realty’s expansion into the Malaysian market, extending its Southeast Asia platform and reinforces its commitment to support the region’s growing digital infrastructure requirements.