Digital Realty is a real estate investment trust that owns, operates and invests in carrier-neutral data centers across the world. The company offers data center, colocation, and interconnection services.
As of June 2023, Digital Realty has more than 300 facilities in more than 25 countries.[2]
Digital Realty is working to switch entirely to renewable power.[7][8] Many of its U.S. and European data centers are powered by renewable energy.[9] The company has 1 GW of wind and solar projects under contract in Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Arizona and Virginia[9][10] and has installed 1.8 MW of solar panels in Kenya, Greece, Switzerland, and South Korea.[9][11] The company says it avoided emitting 1.8 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions (MtCO2e) in 2022.[9]
History
The company was formed in 2004 by GI Partners, which contributed 21 data centers that it acquired through bankruptcy auctions and from distressed companies at a 20–40% discount to replacement cost.[12]
In July 2013, the company doubled capacity at its data center in Chandler, Arizona.[19]
In May 2015, the company sold a building in Philadelphia for $161 million that it acquired in 2005 for $59 million.[20]
In October 2015, the company acquired Telx for $1.886 billion.[21]
In November 2015, the company acquired 125.9 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County, Virginia, for $43 million and announced plans to build a 2 million-square-foot data center on the property.[22]
In July 2016, the company acquired 8 data centers in Europe from Equinix for $874 million.[23]
In March 2017, the company announced a $22.0 million expansion of its data center in Atlanta.[24]
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the company in Digital Realty Trust, Inc. v. Somers, a case in which Digital Realty fired an employee who had complained internally about the elimination of supervisory controls and the hiding of cost overruns. After he was fired, the employee sued the company, saying he was protected by whistleblower provisions in Dodd-Frank.[27] The Supreme Court, citing Dodd-Frank, ruled that these protections only applied to whistleblowers who had first notified the SEC.
In December 2018, the company acquired Ascenty for $1.8 billion. At the time, Ascenty operated eight data centers in Brazil.[28]
In October 2019, Digital Realty announced the acquisition of European data center provider Interxion for $8.4 billion to “create a leading global provider of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions”.[29][30]
In January 2021, Digital Realty said it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas.[31]
On 10 September 2024, about 7:45 am, a Digital Realty data centre in Loyang, Singapore, caught fire. According to the Singapore Civil Defence Force, the fire "involved lithium-ion batteries housed in battery rooms on the third floor of a four-storey building". Digital Realty said its employees were evacuated from the data centre without injuries. The fire affected Lazada and Bytedance's systems, as well as Alibaba Cloud's Availability zone C in Singapore,[33][34] and possibly DigitalOcean, Coolify, and Cloudflare.[35]
