Digital infrastructure company Equinix has set up a joint venture to raise US$15 billion in partnership with GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund) and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).
The JV will fund the expansion of Equinix’s xScale data centre portfolio, which enables companies to add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres.
The capital will enable Equinix to purchase land to build new xScale facilities on multiple greater-than-100-megawatt (MW) campuses in the US, adding more than 1.5 gigawatts of new capacity for hyperscale customers.
With the capital raised through the JV, Equinix expects the JV to purchase land to build new state-of-the-art xScale facilities on multiple greater-than-100-megawatt (MW) campuses in the US, eventually adding more than 1.5 gigawatts of new capacity for hyperscale customers.
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"As the world's leading companies build out their infrastructure to support key workloads such as artificial intelligence, they require the combination of large-scale data centre footprints optimised for AI training and interconnection nodes for the most efficient inferencing,” said Equinix CEO and president Adaire Fox-Martin.
Our xScale and IBX offerings are uniquely positioned to address this business need, enabling companies to realise the powerful potential of AI,”
“GIC's capital and scale, paired with Equinix's operational expertise, has driven meaningful value across our investments together. Through this joint venture, we look forward to providing the funding needed to develop state-of-the-art digital infrastructure across the US alongside our like-minded partner, CPP Investments,” said GIC chief investment officer, real estate Goh Chin Kiong.
Data Center Dynamics reported Equinix first partnered with GIC in October 2019 to develop hyperscale facilities under the xScale portfolio.
Before the announcement, the pair had jointly invested more than US$7.5 billion in xScale-branded data centres built in the UK, Japan, France, Brazil, and South Korea.
CPP, on the other hand, has partnered with Blackstone to acquire Australian data centre operator AirTrunk for US$16.1 billion.
“This investment will help meet the increasing demand for data centres driven by rapid technological advancements and marks a significant step forward in our broader data centre strategy,” said CPP Investments senior managing director, global head of real assets and head of Europe Max Biagosch.