EXPANDING XSCALE PORTFOLIO TO 32 FACILITIES

Equinix has today announced agreements to expand its joint ventures portfolios with GIC in the form of limited liability partnerships, which when closed and fully implemented will bring the xScaleTM data center portfolio to 32 facilities globally with over $6.9 billion in worth.

Prior to this announcement, Equinix and the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC already have active joint ventures for the development of Equinix xScaleTM data centers in Europe and Asia where the JV intends to invest over $1 billion in Tokyo and Osaka for the deployment of 3 hyperscale data centers.

“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.”

With the latest expansion plan, the xScale data center portfolio will span three regions, providing more than 600MW of power capacity when fully built out. The planned facilities for Europe include three data centers Dublin, five in Frankfurt, one in Helsinki, two in London, two in Madrid, one in Milan, four in Paris, and one in Warsaw.

In Asia, three xScale data centers are planned for Osaka and three in Tokyo. While the Americas will have one xScale data center in Mexico City and three in São Paulo. Equinix also stated that three additional sites will be announced at a future date.

Based on the terms of the latest Joint Venture agreements, GIC will own an 80% equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20% equity interest. The JV transactions are expected to close in several phases over the course of 2021, subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions.