Digital Realty has announced that Blackfuel has chosen Digital Realty’s BCN1 data center in Barcelona as the base to deploy and scale its AI inference platform. Powered by Dell Technologies AI Factory infrastructure with liquid cooling and AMD GPUs, the deployment brings together significant dedicated AI capability, Digital Realty’s global PlatformDIGITAL ecosystem, and ServiceFabric, the company’s software-defined interconnection platform.
Openly designed, Digital Realty’s platform supports a wide variety of AI infrastructure and acceleration architectures across its global ecosystem, providing customers with the flexibility to deploy AI where and how it best fits their workloads.
At the core of the collaboration is the integration of Blackfuel’s inference platform with ServiceFabric, which will allow AI services to be offered through Digital Realty’s connected ecosystem, closer to the business applications, data and users they are intended for.
Low jitter and latency network
Instead of forcing organizations to move large volumes of data across public environments to access AI capabilities, the solution brings inference closer to where the data already resides. Using private connectivity, ServiceFabric provides low latency and a low-jitter network, which can reduce Time-to-First-Token (TTFT), improve response times, and accelerate the execution of agentic AI workflows. At the same time, it offers companies greater control over security and data flow.
For agentic workflows that require 20 to 50 sequential calls to inference APIs, a 50 millisecond reduction in TTFT thanks to ServiceFabric’s optimized latency can shorten total task completion time by 1 to 2.5 seconds compared to connectivity over the public internet. At a scale of millions of daily tasks, these improvements can translate into significant efficiency gains, demonstrating the relevance of low-latency connectivity alongside inference performance.
By connecting directly to ServiceFabric, Blackfuel can access businesses, cloud providers, networks and digital ecosystems across Digital Realty’s global platform, creating a scalable path for customers to consume high-performance AI inference services within the environments where they already run their digital operations.
Blackfuel can access companies, cloud providers, networks and digital ecosystems from the entire global Digital Realty platform
“The next layer of infrastructure will be built around tokens. Together with Digital Realty and ServiceFabric, we are creating the foundation of Blackfuel’s AI Token Grid: dedicated inference capacity with global reach and local control, connected to the places where data and business applications live. Barcelona is our first step towards something much bigger: making reliable AI capacity available to businesses wherever they need it,” said Blackfuel.
Accessible AI service
Today, ServiceFabric extends to more than 800 Digital Realty and third-party data centers around the world, providing Blackfuel with a global connectivity infrastructure from which it can scale its AI services beyond Barcelona and facilitate access to distributed enterprise data sets, tools and applications. This helps transform AI from an internet-accessible service to an enterprise-grade platform, improving the responsiveness, governance and scalability of its adoption in business-critical use cases.
“The next phase of AI will be measured in useful tokens per megawatt, and offering them requires much more than computing power. It requires power, cooling and connectivity working together as a single platform,” said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty. “By adding Blackfuel’s inference platform to ServiceFabric, companies can access high-performance AI services within the same connected ecosystem where their applications and data already reside. Barcelona is the first demonstration of this model, and we are delighted to help Blackfuel expand its reach from here.”
