In response to unprecedented enterprise adoption of hyperscale clouds, digital infrastructure player Equinix is expanding the number of xScale data centres it has in operation worldwide. Over the past two years, the company has invested $3 billion in new xScale facilities, and is now speeding up development to meet the growing demands of its cloud provider customers. In addition to six xScale facilities developed since 2019, new builds are now planned in Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Madrid, Milan, Paris and Warsaw.
In order to fund this new development, Equinix has announced an additional $3.9 billion joint venture with Singapore-based partner GIC, a state-owned investment fund. The new deal will bring total xScale data centre spend to more than $6.9 billion across 32 facilities globally. Equinix says demand for its services is especially high in Europe, driven by cloud service providers which account for 80% of data centre market demand across the Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris (FLAP) metros.
The Global Interconnection Index (GXI) expects this market to grow 60% in the run up to 2023. Analysts agree that the data centre market is heating up to meet rising demand. Baron Fung, Research Director with independent analyst firm Dell’Oro Group, has recently released figures showing rising capital expenditure on servers which he believes is an important indicator of data centre growth: “Servers generally comprise more than half of data centre capital expenditure,” he explains. “Other areas include compute, storage, networking, power and cooling.”
Dell’Oro’s projections for server shipments in the run up to 2025 anticipate 6% compound growth, spread evenly across different buyer segments. Last year, according to Dell’Oro, the top four US cloud providers – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook – accounted for more than a third of all global shipments of servers worldwide and look set to increase this share over time as they continue to consolidate infrastructure.
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