Data centre firm Equinix will invest $1 billion (approximately £793 million) into building six data centres across Europe to support some of the biggest cloud players like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Backed by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Equinix will establish new xScale facilities in key locations around Europe, including London and Paris. They will be based near, or on, the firm’s International Business Exchange (IBX) campuses and provide companies with heightened connectivity and edge computing capabilities.
Equinix is only targeting hyperscale companies initially. These, in addition to Azure and GCP, includes Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to support their unique workloads.
“It has been a long journey to reach this point, but we are tremendously excited to announce the formation of our first xScale data centers joint venture,” said Equinix president and CEO Charles Meyers.
“Partnering with a world-class investment partner like GIC will provide the opportunity to make significant capital investments in order to capture targeted large-footprint deployments while continuing to optimize our capital structure.
“The JV [joint-venture] structure will enable us to extend our cloud leadership while providing significant value to a critical set of hyperscale customers.”
Six xScale data centres, of which two are to be based in London, will allow customers to add core deployments to their existing access points so they can expand on a single platform. These are also specifically-engineered to meet the technical and operational requirements of hyperscale companies’ workloads.
The infrastructure will be managed and staffed by Equinix while being connected to the Equinix global platform in order to provide a non-disrupted experience for hyperscale firms.
“As hyperscale companies expand around the world, they will increasingly look to partners to provide both broad global scale and deep local knowledge when deploying data center space,” said vice president for datacentre infrastructure and services with 451 Research Kelly Morgan.
“By increasing the number of hyperscale facilities in the EMEA region, the joint venture between Equinix and GIC aims to accelerate the adoption of hybrid and multicloud as the IT architecture of choice by companies throughout the region.”
Equinix will sell its London LD10 and Paris PA8 IBX data centre facilities to the fund that manages this $1 billion joint-venture, with new xScale data centres expected to come to fruition on these sites.
New data centres will also be built in Amsterdam, London and on two sites in Frankfurt.