Customer Corner : Digital Realty – Cummins’ Favourite Diesel-Dependent Hypocrites Who Can’t Stop Getting Sued

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Digital Realty Trust. One of the biggest data-centre landlords on the planet. One of those shiny infrastructure outfits Cummins loves to parade in a glossy case study while everyone pretends the emergency backbone of the digital future is not still a filthy great diesel machine waiting behind the curtain.

Cummins’ own case study says it delivered six roof-mounted C2250D5 diesel generator sets powered by QSK60-G4 engines for Digital Realty, with acoustic enclosures and fuel systems providing 9.6 MW of reliable prime power. Translation: when the grid starts coughing, the future still reaches for diesel.

We have been through the customer list. We have pulled the case studies. And now we are pulling the scandals. Because when Cummins sells “sustainability” and “integrity” out one side of its mouth while its diesel gensets keep the lights on for lawsuit-magnet infrastructure landlords, someone is going to read the stitching.

The Supreme Court Whistleblower Smackdown

Former Digital Realty Vice President Paul Somers alleged that the company fired him after he reported suspected securities-law violations through internal management channels. Digital Realty took the Dodd-Frank point all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won 9-0.

The ruling was brutal. Internal reporting alone did not make Somers a protected Dodd-Frank whistleblower. To get that protection, you had to report to the SEC. A landmark precedent that told employees the quiet part out loud: trust the internal process at your peril.

Corporate compliance brochure in the front window. Trapdoor underneath.

Your Own Safety Director Gets The Boot

In February 2026, Thomas Barnard, Digital Realty’s Director of Safety & Health, sued in the Northern District of Texas. He says that after his father-in-law was murdered and he was later violently assaulted on a work trip, Digital Realty made him work while recovering and then fired him while he was on leave.

That is not some random warehouse temp in a dusty corner of the machine. That is the safety and health director. The person whose job title sounds like it came out of the “we care” drawer. Disability discrimination and retaliation allegations from the very department orbiting safety, health and human decency. The irony is so thick it needs a generator permit.

Chicago Noise Hell In Printer’s Row

Residents around Digital Realty’s 600 South Federal Street facility in Chicago complained for years about constant fan noise and diesel-generator disruption. Data Center Dynamics reported that the site had 4 MW of generator capacity, residents said rooftop HVAC noise was keeping them awake, acoustic surveys found levels above legal limits, and Digital Realty was fined over ground-level diesel generator noise.

One resident described it as a mosquito in the ear all the time. Digital Realty installed a sound wall. Residents still had to live with the corporate lullaby of data-centre “progress” grinding through their windows.

Those are not presented here as the exact Cummins units from the case study. What they are is the same diesel-dependent data-centre religion Cummins keeps selling as “reliability”. Same sermon. Same smell. Same communities left listening to the machinery.

Biometric Privacy Fuckery

In Illinois, Digital Realty Management Services was hit with a BIPA class-action complaint alleging it required fingerprint scans for building access without the proper written consent, public retention policy and biometric-data destruction schedule required under the state’s biometric privacy law.

The complaint alleged fingerprints were treated like a cheap swipe card. Not passwords. Not badges. Fingerprints. The kind of personal data you do not get to reset after some corporate process goblin decides paperwork is optional.

Digital Realty denied parts of the allegations. Fine. That is what defendants do. The point for Customer Corner is simpler: Cummins’ shiny customer is not just a data-centre landlord. It is another corporate actor with a legal trail wide enough to drive a diesel genset through.

Salt Typhoon Comes Knocking

In 2025, Nextgov/FCW reported that U.S. security agencies had assessed Digital Realty as a likely or potential victim in the Chinese state-linked Salt Typhoon espionage campaign. Data Center Dynamics followed with its own report that Digital Realty was reportedly among the victims.

So here we have a Tier-1 data-centre landlord, one of the companies selling secure digital infrastructure to the grown-ups, ending up named in the critical-infrastructure hacking trail. Brilliant.

The safest wording is not that Digital Realty has admitted a breach. It has not, at least not in the material cited here. The point is that its name turned up in reported U.S. agency assessments around one of the ugliest cyber-espionage campaigns in recent memory. For a company flogging secure infrastructure, that is still a lovely little stink bomb.

Boardroom Revolving Door And Governance Stink

Then there is the boardroom theatre. Digital Realty’s board voted to terminate long-time CEO Bill Stein “without cause” in December 2022. A month later, COO Erich Sanchack was being removed as part of what the company called a broader leadership realignment.

By June 2023, former Chairman Laurence Chapman had resigned from the board citing disagreement over governance policy and practice. His resignation letter raised concerns about governance processes, CEO succession and board conduct. Digital Realty said its governance policies and practices were compliant and robust, and that the letter reflected Chapman’s views.

Lovely. One side says robust governance. The former chairman says governance stink. Somewhere in the middle sits the usual investor-grade fog machine, pumping out enough “process” to suffocate a horse.

Cummins’ Digital Future Still Smells Like Diesel

This is the point. Digital Realty does not sit in Cummins’ customer trail as some random logo on a forgotten brochure. Cummins has a public case study celebrating its diesel generator work for Digital Realty. Cummins sold the critical protection power. Cummins provided the hardware that lets the data-centre dream keep humming when the grid blinks.

And Digital Realty, meanwhile, brings the rest of the buffet: whistleblower precedent, disability-discrimination allegations, biometric privacy litigation, neighbourhood noise complaints, Salt Typhoon reporting and boardroom governance stink.

You talk reliability. You talk sustainability. You talk integrity.

You are a walking, diesel-belching, lawsuit-magnet hypocrisy machine

TCAP Is Reading The Stitching

Cummins thought Customer Corner was just a list. It is not. It is a map. We have got the customer names. We have got the case studies. We have got the scandals. We have got the redirects in Cummins’ own newsroom when they think nobody is paying attention.

Every time Cummins slips old comfort copy into fresh dates, and every time one of its shiny customers turns out to be knee-deep in lawsuits, complaints, fines, hacking reports or governance sludge, someone is reading the fucking stitching.

You cannot even run your own house without the person you discriminated against catching the smell.

Sad.

Digital Realty and Cummins. Two peas in a very greasy, very hypocritical pod.

Customer Corner stays open. Next one is already cooking.

Receipts remain. Watchfulness is leverage.

Fuck off.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources / Receipts

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