A JOINT VENTURE FOR 3 HYPERSCALE DATA CENTERS

Equinix Inc. has signed a joint venture with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC to develop and operate three data centers in Japan.

The Joint Venture is worth more than $1 billion in cash and assets. GIC is putting-in cash and will own 80 percent of the joint venture’s assets while Equinix is to get 20 percent with the transfer of two facilities which are under construction – TY12 in Tokyo, and OS2 in Osaka – along with land and development rights to build another site in Tokyo.

The three planned data centers in Japan, two in Tokyo and one in Osaka will offer a total of 138MW power capacity when fully built out. The pair said its focus is on a targeted group of hyperscale customers that offer significant value to the cloud ecosystem currently at Equinix.

According to Equinix, world 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 210 data centers to directly connect to their strategic business partners and customers.

Equinix data centers TY12 and OS2 add up the company’s facilities in Japan to 13, having opened the eleventh data center TY11 in July, 2019.

“Hybrid and multi-cloud have emerged as the clear IT architecture of choice, and Equinix is continuing its efforts to satisfy both the interconnection and core workload needs of the top hyperscale and cloud companies powering this infrastructure,” said Charles Meyers, President and CEO of Equinix.

“Following our successful partnership with GIC on the initial xScale data center joint venture in Europe announced last year, we are now continuing our partnership with the formation of a new joint venture in Japan.”

The joint venture is expected to close in the second half of 2020 but subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions.