Digital infrastructure group Equinix has joined forces with Singapore's sovereign wealth fund to launch a new development joint venture to build out data centres across the world.
As part of the agreement, the two partners will invest $3.9 bn to build out the Equinix platform to a total of 32 data centres over a two year period. GIC will own an 80% equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20% equity interest.
In Europe, the two partners plan to develop three xScale data centers in Dublin, five in Frankfurt, one in Helsinki, two in London, two in Madrid, one in Milan, four in Paris and one in Warsaw.
‘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 centers 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. 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 our traditional retail data center and digital infrastructure business and maintain our strategic and financial flexibility.’
It is expected that the xScale portfolio of 32 facilities will provide more than 600 megawatts (MW) of power capacity when fully built out.
