Equinix has agreed to additional joint ventures in the form of limited liability partnerships with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. When closed and built out, this will bring the xScale data center portfolio to greater than $6.9 billion across 32 facilities globally.
xScale data centres add to Equinix’s global platform of more than 220 International Business Exchang (IBX) data centres by serving the unique core workload deployment needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies.
After deal closing and buildout, the xScale data centre portfolio will span three regions. In Europe, there are three facilities in Dublin, five in Frankfurt, one in Helsinki, two in London, two in Madrid, one in Milan, four in Paris and one in Warsaw.
In the Asia-Pacific region, there are three in Osaka and three in Tokyo. In the American, there is one in Mexico City and three in São Paulo. Three additional sites are expected to be announced later.
“For years, the world’s largest cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, have partnered with Equinix to leverage its global platform of more than 220 data centres to directly connect to their strategic business partners and customers,” said Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix.
“With our xScale program, these hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers,” said Meyers.
He said the joint venture arrangement of xScale enables these large deployments to be structured in an off-balance sheet model that aims to preserve capital for investment in Equinix’s traditional retail data centre and digital infrastructure business, and maintain their strategic and financial flexibility.
When fully built out, it is expected that the xScale portfolio of 32 facilities will provide more than 600 megawatts of power capacity.
With xScale data centres, hyperscale companies can add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix, enabling their growth on a single platform that can immediately span 63 global metros and offer direct interconnection to their customers and strategic business partners.
As hyperscale companies scale their operations at Equinix, the ecosystem of nearly 10,000 enterprises and other companies currently operating at Equinix expect to benefit from increased opportunities to directly connect and operate in proximity to the largest global cloud operators.
The JV projects with GIC are expected to close in several waves within this year, pending regulatory approval and other closing conditions.
Under the terms of the JV agreements, GIC will own an 80% equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20% equity interest.
