Equinix has set up a joint venture with GIC and CPP to raise more than $15 Billion worth of funds.
On Tuesday, the company announced Equinix Joint Venture with Singapore’s wealth fund GIC and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The joint venture is formed to finance the development of new data centers in the US for hyperscale customers.
The company aims to use the capital for purchasing lands to set up more than 100MW data center campuses to increase the capacity for Equinix’s hyperscale customers. In the last few years, Equinix is focused on the expansion of Data Centers by forming Joint Ventures with large investors like PGIM and GCI.
Image: Equinix
Aim of Equinix Joint Venture
The main motive of the joint venture is to create the funds for the expansion of the xScale, a product through which hyperscale providers can add core deployments to their existing footprints at IBX data centers. The JV will increase the number of data campuses in the US which will eventually add 1.5GW more capacity for Equinix’s customers.
The company is planning to scale the Data Center Expansions as there is a high demand for digital infrastructure in the US and Equinix is one of the largest data centers used by some of the largest technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Numbers of the Equinix Joint Venture
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and GIC will own the equity of 37.5% in the joint venture, while Equinix will have the equity of the remaining 25%.
Equinix and CPP Joint Venture has been signed for the first time while GIC first partnered with the company in October 2019 to develop the facilities for the hyperscale customers. Earlier, they jointly invested more than $7 billion to establish data centers in various countries including South Korea, the UK, Japan, France, and Brazil.
In April, Equinix also formed a joint venture with PGIM worth $600 million to set up data centers in Silicon Valley. This JV will offer 28 MW of IT capacity. Overall, Equinix is one of the largest real estate investment trusts focused on data centers, with a market capitalization of almost $84 billion.
Thoughts behind the Joint Venture
Adaire Fox-Martin, CEO and President of Equinix said, the world’s leading companies are in the need to build their infrastructure to support keyloads such as Artificial Intelligence. For the most efficient inferencing, these companies require a combination of large-scale data centers optimized as per the AI standards and requirements. xScale and IBX offers are uniquely positioned to meet these needs of business and enable companies to utilize the full potential of AI.
While Gho Chin Kiong, Chief Investment Officer of real estate at GIC stated, “We are proud to expand our years-long partnership with Equinix.” He mentioned that GIC Capital and funds along with the operational expertise of Equinix will cater to the growing demand of the digital infrastructure. Through this JV, GIC will provide the funding needed to scale the data centers all over the US and to fulfill the demand for digital transformation.
With the increased usage of AI and growing demand for cloud services, Equinix is looking forward to scaling its data centers to increase the capacity for the hyperscale customers and large technology companies.