Data center firm Digital Realty has launched a new liquid cooling lab in London, UK.

The company announced the opening of its Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in the Docklands area of London.

The first EMEA location in the company's network of hands-on testing facilities, the London DRIL gives customers and partners a dedicated space to test, validate, and optimize AI and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions in a live data center environment, before they commit to full- scale deployment.

The 100 sqm (1,100 sq ft) lab – at Digital’s LHR19 facility – offers densities of up to 150kW or more, using direct-to-chip liquid cooling and cold aisle containment on a raised floor. The lab relies on a 1.5MW CDU from Inova.

At the launch event attended by DCD, Digital Realty’s EMEA MD Paula Cogan said plans to bring a liquid cooling lab to EMEA were first discussed in September and will help give customers “confidence around AI use cases.”

Digital currently operates DRILs in Virginia in the US and Tokyo, Japan. The company said it is currently planning to roll out six labs in total. The company plans to open further DRIL locations in Singapore, São Paulo, and Johannesburg in 2026.

"The economics of AI have shifted. Enterprises are moving from training-led pilots to distributed, inference-led production, and the bottleneck is no longer model capability, it's infrastructure design. Winning architectures will be private, hybrid, and openly interconnected, and that's exactly what London can now prove out in our lab — workloads validated end-to-end across ServiceFabric and our Private AI Exchange (AIPx) before a single switch is flipped in production. London is one of the densest interconnection points in Europe; bringing DRIL here gives EMEA enterprises a place to engineer AI that actually pays back,” said Chris Sharp, Digital Realty CTO.

The lab currently features an Orca quantum computer and several racks from Oracle. The lab is also connected to Digital’s other London facilities as well as its Service Fabric offering, allowing customers to connect workloads in the lab to other facilities.

“From day one, Orca has built quantum systems designed to run inside the same data center environments that enterprises already depend on. That makes our relationship with Digital Realty a natural fit,” said Richard Murray, co-founder and CEO of Orca Computing. “The Digital Realty Innovation Lab gives customers the opportunity to experience our PT Series photonic quantum systems operating in a production-grade environment, integrated alongside the infrastructure they use today.”

LHR19 – also known as Cloud House West – is located at 1 Muirfield Crescent. Launched in 2019, the data center totals 138,800 sq ft (12,895 sqm) across five stories. CBRE Investment Management owns the facility, acquiring it from Aberdeen Group in 2024.

Telehouse and Global Switch have previously launched liquid cooling labs at their respective Docklands facilities.