On Monday, the world’s largest colocation data center provider, Equinix and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, announced a series of agreements to add $3.9 billion in new investments to an existing portfolio of xScale data center joint ventures. The new investments will bring the value of the Equinix-GIC portfolio to nearly $7 billion across 32 locations around the world, more than doubling the size of the previous commitment.
Consistent with the terms of previously announced JV agreements between Equinix and GIC, the Singapore fund will own an 80 percent equity interest in all future ventures, while Equinix will retain the remaining 20 percent.
xScale data centers cater to the needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies: i.e. cloud service providers. The portfolio will span three regions: Europe (specificaly Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris and Warsaw); Asia-Pacific (Osaka and Tokyo); and the Americas (Mexico City and São Paulo). Equinix’s global data center platform already features more than 40 percent of all private on-ramps to the world’s top cloud service providers, more than any other company.
The partnership expansion builds upon Equinix and GIC‘s existing xScale partnerships, which were formalized in Japan in 2020 and in Europe in 2019.
“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. With our xScale program, these hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers,” Equinix CEO Charles Meyers said in an official statement.
“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,” he added.
