For over 20 years, Digital Realty has designed and operated some of the most complex data center infrastructure environments. With a heritage built on supporting a diverse range of customers, including the largest hyperscale cloud providers and enterprises, Digital Realty has worked to solve challenges that most enterprises were only beginning to encounter, from advanced cooling requirements and globally consistent IT architectures to connectivity capable of supporting massive workloads.
These lessons became the foundation of PlatformDIGITAL®, Digital Realty’s global data center platform designed to support the most demanding digital workloads.
Today, the same infrastructure principles are essential for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) deployments. We’re seeing a critical shift where AI has moved from being a purely experimental, localized, or cloud-dependent tool to a ubiquitous, integrated, and operational part of mission-critical applications. Enterprises are driving the next phase of AI at scale—deploying and running AI models in production, fine-tuning models for specific use cases, and creating inference and insights for real-time decision-making.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty, where he oversees both internal and customer-facing technology strategy and programs. In his role as CTO, he guides the business’ approach to managing the endless possibilities of technologies—including everything from AI and quantum computing to future advancements that are yet to arise—and helps customers and investors understand and leverage the full potential of these technologies.
Before his current role, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities to enable next-generation, high-performance exchange and interconnection solutions to facilitate broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis.
Previously, Sharp held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI / Verizon Business, and Reliance Globalcom.
