Equinix on Monday announced that it’s expanding its joint venture with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with an additional $3.9 billion investment in data centers for hyperscale companies. The joint venture specifically supports Equinix’s xScale data center portfolio, which serves the unique core workload deployment needs of hyperscalers, which includes major cloud providers.
“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,” Equinix CEO Charles Meyers said in a statement. “With our xScale program, these hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers.”
Equinix and GIC established the joint venture in 2020. Following the new investments, the xScale data center portfolio will be worth more than $6.9 billion and span 32 facilities across three regions — Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas. The total xScale portfolio should provide more than 600 megawatts (MW) of power capacity when fully built out. Additionally, Equinix and GIC already have plans to add three more sites at a future date.
Equinix formed a joint venture with GIC to launch the xScale portfolio so the large deployments could be structured in an off-balance sheet model. That lets Equinix preserve capital for investment in its traditional retail data center and digital infrastructure business. Under the terms of the joint venture, GIC will own an 80 percent equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20 percent.
