Located in Vinhedo, São Paulo, the DRIL will allow customers and partners to test artificial intelligence solutions before deploying them at scale
SÃO PAULO, November 4, 2026 – Ascenty, a joint venture between Digital Realty and Brookfield Infrastructure and Latin America’s largest data center and connectivity provider, today announced the opening of the region’s first Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL). Located at Ascenty’s campus in Vinhedo, São Paulo, the lab will allow customers and partners to test, validate and optimize AI infrastructure solutions from multiple vendors in a live data center environment before deploying them at scale.
The facility combines high-density infrastructure, advanced cooling technologies, resilient connectivity and partner solutions. It will help customers evaluate how these components work together and identify the architecture best suited to their needs. Testing can inform investment decisions, help optimize costs and prepare infrastructure to support growing AI workloads.
“Bringing the DRIL to São Paulo is a direct investment in the future of AI in Latin America. Our commitment to the region is backed by years of experience designing, building and operating infrastructure. That experience gives us a deep understanding of our customers’ needs and enables us to support their growth,” said Chris Torto, founder and CEO of Ascenty.
Infrastructure built for AI
As AI adoption accelerates, so do the demands on power, cooling and equipment integration. The São Paulo DRIL was designed to test workloads in liquid-cooled racks capable of supporting densities of 150 kW or more as industry requirements evolve.
The DRIL in São Paulo features a highly efficient closed-loop chilled-water cooling system, containment systems and both liquid-to-liquid and air-to-liquid heat exchange configurations. Customers can compare different approaches to managing the thermal demands of AI infrastructure and evaluate performance before selecting a design for deployment.
To support testing under real-world operating conditions, the facility features distributed redundancy and parallel uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. Two diverse fiber entry points, physically separate routes and a carrier-neutral architecture provide access to multiple network providers.
Integrated building management systems (BMS) and electrical power monitoring systems (EPMS) provide real-time operational visibility. The DRIL also includes multiple layers of physical, network and operational security.
Validating technologies in an integrated environment
The DRIL brings together partner technologies to test the integration of compute, networking, storage, power distribution and cooling. Solutions currently available include Nokia network automation, OpenGlobe open networking, the Oracle AI Customer Excellence Center and Keraunos’ AI infrastructure for workload, routing, and latency testing. The environment also includes liquid cooling solutions from Schneider Electric and Delta; structured cabling from CommScope; Starline busway power distribution; and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) and digital twin tools from TrustedData. Additional project partners include EBM, which handled construction; IDS, which supplied and installed the thermal control system featuring a Starcenter manifold; Multiway, which provided hot-aisle containment and cable trays; and Consultimer, which installed the structured cabling.
“AI infrastructure is evolving at a pace that makes interoperability increasingly complex,” said Claude Brown, Senior Vice President, American Sales at Digital Realty. “As enterprises bring together compute, networking, cooling, and other state-of-the-art technologies, they need confidence that these components will work together and perform at scale as AI workloads move from experimentation into production. The DRIL gives customers and partners around the world a controlled environment to identify potential fail points and prove out their architecture before deployment.”
Partner Quotes
The São Paulo facility joins a global network of Digital Realty Innovation Labs, with existing locations in Virginia, Tokyo and London. Digital Realty plans to open additional facilities in Singapore and Johannesburg by late 2026.
“Enterprises across Latin America increasingly want cloud services delivered inside their own data centers, not consumed from a public region alone. Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer deployed with Digital Realty’s colocation and interconnection at the DRIL gives them a jointly validated architecture they can test against their own workloads, using no-production or sensitive data, only dummy data for testing, in country, before making deployment decisions” – João Paulo Lunardelli, Head Oracle AI Customer Excellence Center in Latin America.
“AI deployments underperform when network limitations prevent organizations from fully utilizing their costly GPU infrastructure, an issue that only becomes apparent once the full stack is running together. Nokia technologies validated at the DRIL, including Nokia Data Center Fabric and our 7750 SR routers, provide the trusted, high-performance connectivity needed for next-generation AI infrastructure. By combining Nokia’s networking expertise with Digital Realty’s power, cooling and interconnection capabilities, the lab enables customers to validate interoperability, automation and network performance under real AI workloads before scaling deployments” – Javier Falcón, VP Network Infrastructure for Latin America, Nokia.
“For a decade, OpenGlobe has been designing, testing and deploying Open Compute and Open Networking in real production environments, and today we are recognized as Latin America’s first OCP Experience Center. That expertise is what we bring to DRIL São Paulo: the most powerful AI infrastructure, built from the best of every vendor, with full freedom of choice and lower total cost of ownership. For Ascenty, its partners and customers, what is validated here, we deliver anywhere in the world” – Victor Fernando Proscurchin, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, OpenGlobe.
“This collaboration marks the first physical deployment of Keraunos’ sovereign AI platform in Brazil. As part of the NVIDIA ecosystem, we will showcase our AI Virtual Private Cloud model, providing dedicated, secure, and scalable infrastructure for enterprises and public-sector organizations, with data remaining under local control and a clear path from workload validation to production. Beyond demonstrating the technology, the project will validate a replicable deployment model and help accelerate the conversion of demand into production-ready infrastructure. This is the first step toward building a multi-megawatt sovereign AI platform in Brazil and, subsequently, across Latin America” – Eduardo Meyer, Co-founder and COO of Keraunos Compute.
