For data center player Equinix, it's all about digital transformation. It is growing revenue as well as capacity, with digital transformation the main driver of both.

The company has embarked on a global growth binge, planning an extra 258MW in capacity – equivalent to half the current total - to come online over the next 18 months. "We’re trying to set ourselves up as the digital platform for transformation of enterprise customers," Equinix APAC president Jeremy Deutsch told Light Reading.

For data centers, digital transformation means businesses shifting their IT infrastructure into their facilities to get closer to customers and ensure better performance of digital services.

Figure 1: Equinix is planning to boost its data center capacity to meet growing demand.
(Source: kubala / Alamy Stock Photo)

Deutsch says that while Equinix does a lot of business with hyperscalers, it believes the biggest upside is in enterprise. The company has over 10,000 customers, including more than half of all Fortune 500 companies.

"All of it comes back to the fact that companies in the digital world need to interconnect with each other and the location where that happens is at Equinix," Deutsch said.

The company is already in a sweet growth phase. It has just reported Q1 revenue of $2 billion, up 15%, with 36% higher operating income of $384 million.

Business-grade AI

Its biggest segment is cloud and IT, accounting for 36% of revenue, with enterprise accounting for 35% and network operators 22%.

Deutsch says Equinix sees its differentiation in being able to provide the ecosystems that support enterprises doing digital business. That includes the presence of hyperscale cloud players and their cloud applications as well as providing connection to services and tools in major verticals, he said, citing healthcare and financial services as examples.

He describes the world of generative AI services as an emerging ecosystem that is attracting a lot of interest from customers. "They're all very interested in making sure that it's business grade," he said.

"The available service now is a great tool but doesn't have the security and latency and all those kinds of connectivity pieces. It's not that fit for business at mass scale, but that is going to happen very quickly."

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— Robert Clark, Contributing Editor, special to Light Reading