Equinix at Global Communications Infrastructure Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) presented its strategic vision at the Global Communications Infrastructure Conference. The company emphasized its growth strategy, focusing on infrastructure investments and AI positioning. Equinix aims for double-digit revenue growth, leveraging debt and internal cash for funding. While optimistic about market opportunities, the company acknowledged competitive challenges in various regions.

Key Takeaways

• Equinix plans to invest $20 to $25 billion in xScale data centers by 2029.
• The company targets double-digit revenue growth and a 52% operating margin by 2029.
• AI inference workloads are expected to drive growth, especially from 2027.
• Geographic expansion is prioritized in the U.S., Asia-Pacific, and EMEA regions.
• Equinix aims to reduce customer churn to 2% to 2.5%.

Financial Results

• Aspiration for double-digit revenue growth.
• AFFO growth projected at 5% to 9% in 2026.
• Target operating margin of 52% or higher by 2029.
• Planned capital expenditure of $1 billion per year for the next five years.
• Capital raised in Singapore at 2.9%, below the anticipated 4.9%.
• Acknowledged a nearly 100 basis point change in the 10-year treasury rate since the last analyst day.

Operational Updates

• Heavy investments in the U.S., Asia-Pacific, and EMEA, with xScale initially focused on the U.S.
• New sites in Indonesia, Chennai, and an acquisition in the Philippines.
• Significant projects in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Oman.
• A 240-megawatt project outside Atlanta.
• Strong demand with supply challenges; pricing varies by market.
• Emphasis on cost management through AI and automation.

Future Outlook

• Focus on AI inference workloads as a key growth driver from 2027.
• Strategic partnerships to enhance xScale growth opportunities.
• Excited about the Grok inference-as-a-service model.
• Anticipates increased use of liquid cooling applications.
• Plans to accelerate growth of Equinix Fabric, the network interconnection platform.

Q&A Highlights

• Hosting an AI Summit to detail the company’s AI strategy.
• Addressed aging carrier hotel assets and future-proofing for AI needs.
• Emphasized the importance of Equinix Fabric in connecting sites.

In conclusion, Equinix is poised for substantial growth through strategic investments and AI advancements. For a detailed understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Global Communications Infrastructure Conference:

John Acken, RBC: I’m John Acken with RBC. Please be spending the next 20 minutes on the fireside chat with Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer of Equinix. Welcome, Keith.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Thanks, John. I’m going to be making some forward-looking statements in all likelihood, so please do refer to our SEC documents. Now you can go.

John Acken, RBC: Maybe just to kind of set the stage, because there’s a mix of folks in the audience, and you did have your investor day in June where you laid out kind of multi-year guidance. Maybe just to level set, remind us kind of what you see yourself doing over the next several years around top line, EBITDA, AFFO, and so forth.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Yeah. We did June 25th, we had the analyst day. I think many of you are aware of it. It was a story about growth, investing for the future, taking up our CapEx, roughly $1 billion a year for the next five years, to $20 to $25 billion of investment through 2029. Obviously, we felt revenue can continue to grow with an aspiration to get to double-digit revenue growth. AFFO, the underlying business is going to grow healthily, but with refinancing and the raising of additional capital, we have a little bit of investment horizon in 2026, and that’s sort of 5% to 9% growth. The dividend would continue to accelerate. I thought one of the things, John, I know you didn’t ask for this, but I’m going to give it to you anyway.

I thought it was a very forward-leaning, investor-focused presentation because I also said we’re going to only raise debt. We’re going to use our balance sheet and the cash that we generate plus debt, and we’re going to invest in this growth. I think all of you, or many of you probably already met Adaire, and if you haven’t, she’s a force to be reckoned with, a great lady, great CEO, and her aspiration is to grow as fast as we can. The challenge that we have is the timeline to grow the business because it takes two, three, in some cases, four years to develop the capacity. You know the time horizon of when you invest versus when you realize the fruits of that investment are beyond the planning cycle.

Our aspiration is to grow as fast as we can with a margin that will be 52% or plus over that time period by the time we get to 2029.

John Acken, RBC: Your global had been for quite some time, a lot of it organic, some of it inorganic. As you look at kind of the pie chart of Americas versus EMEA versus Asia-Pacific, where you’re allocating capital, where you see kind of the demand opportunities, what’s different compared to today around geographic mix?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: I think probably for many in this room, the opportunity is immense around the globe. We’re investing heavily in the United States, but we also have some very, very critical markets around the globe in Asia-Pacific and in EMEA. xScale is a little bit different. At least xScale or 2.0 exercise is first focused on the United States, but you’ll see us talk about major metro, or sorry, larger campuses in Asia-Pacific and EMEA, hopefully in the not too distant future. That’s the appetite. It is a global opportunity. The markets are growing. We tend to be a little bit different than a lot of the other players largely because if it’s not xScale, we’re selling 4,000 transactions a quarter to 3,000 customers or something of that order of magnitude depending on the quarter.

Where xScale is, you’re selling to a large hyperscaler, and a lot of people are chasing those opportunities. We’ve got one project that’s currently underway that quite openly, when you step back, we thought it was sizable at the time, but it’s really 240 megawatts. Seems like it’s not that significant anymore. Having said all of that, it does feel like it’s going to be a really good market to build in, which is outside Atlanta. We’re already preparing the land, and we’re going to get the buildings up as fast as we can because the appetite for that type of offering is very real. Let me just stop there and make sure I answered your question.

John Acken, RBC: Yeah, still global and maybe opportunity-driven in terms of where.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: I think it’s opportunity-driven, but there’s markets around the globe, as we all know, I think all of you know, they’re very difficult to build in. You have to recognize that that is the case, and Singapore is a perfect example of that. We’re building out our Singapore SIG asset, which is 20 megawatts, but we want more capacity in Singapore. That’s almost a $1 billion SIG market for us. Because you can’t build maybe at the rate and speed you want to, we’re also building in Johor and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We just opened up our Indonesian site. We just opened up Chennai. We just bought a business in the Philippines. We’re preparing land in Thailand and Bangkok. There’s a number of things that we’re doing that I think really matter to that part of the world.

We’re investing heavily in Hong Kong, although there’s one building that at the end of last year we said that we’re going to take a charge against. It was more because it was an old building that came with an acquisition, but we’re investing heavily in the Hong Kong market because we think it’s really important, largely because Chinese companies coming to the Greater Bay Area of China, which includes Hong Kong, we think that’s going to be an entrée from Chinese companies coming out of Greater China into Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. We remain very excited about the markets in Asia and equally so in Europe. There are emerging markets that we think are really, really attractive. One day I’d love to say that we have an asset in Riyadh.

We’re building out in, we have business in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, in Oman, in Muscat, and Salalah. We’re going to continue to invest in that part of the world. The U.S. is, I think, I mean, it’s just a great place to build right now. It’s an exciting time for the industry.

John Acken, RBC: You talked a little bit about growth indirectly through, say, tuck-ins or new market entry. There’s also just pricing. There’s less churn. Churn can be maybe at the lower end of the range. There could be revenue optimization. There could be headcount in terms of solutions engineers and quota-bearing headcount. How do you kind of view that, all of those sort of things trending? They all do influence the top line as well as EBITDA. Lots to unpack there. Start with sales.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: We only have 20 minutes. We’re going to withdraw all in as much as we can anyway. I think there’s different aspects of it. Certainly, there’s a volume play. I think many of you probably feel that demand isn’t an issue. The real issue is supply, and getting the supply into the market. That’s number one. I think if we have the inventory, we’ll be able to sell it, particularly in the markets that are very rich with opportunity. Pricing is firm. Firm is maybe an understatement. Depending on the market you’re in, pricing is strong. There are markets that tend to be a little bit softer based on the competitive dynamics and the supply coming into the market. Each market has to be analyzed to optimize against the opportunity.

Having said all of that, you have the ability to operate quite efficiently at the asset level, but then you’ve got all the corporate costs and the borrowing costs. I say we’re managing our cost model very effectively. We’re investing heavily in Harmeen, who’s our new CDIO, and AI and all things system-oriented. That includes processes, and that will take costs out of our equation. We’ve got a new CCRO in Shane Paladin. I think his go-to-market strategy and all the things that we do to create demand and keep customers inside our asset are going to be important, including the AI initiatives that we put into understanding the predictive analytics on what’s going to drive outcomes. Between investing in those areas, we can drive down, I think, our cost to operate. We’re going to invest heavily in our go-to-market, the front end of the customer-facing initiatives.

At the same time, I said at analyst day that we’re going to continue to raise capital. It’s going to be debt-oriented. We’re refinancing what we have. The capital that we raised, the last deal that we just did a couple of weeks ago, was in Singapore. Again, $500 million US equivalent at 2.9%. That’s well below the average rate that I assumed at 4.9% at the analyst day. Since analyst day, we’ve almost had a 100 basis point move in the 10-year treasury. We’re going to be able to raise capital eventually in the U.S. The next port of call is going to be probably in North America, not in the U.S. We’re going to go back to Europe because I think the opportunity is ripe.

We will be able to drive down, I think, that cost to borrow further, probably lower than where we were guiding to, largely because the market, as I said at that time, if the markets allow or permit for it, we’ll borrow money cheaper. We are really undertaking a very strict review on capitalization because the market had asked us to do that or the investors did. We are doing that as a team and looking at that. A number of things are working very much in our favor. Maybe the last thing I would say, and I’ve said it to some of the people in the audience already, when the market speaks, whether or not you agree with our posture, the market’s broken. We need to respond to the market conditions and what our investors are expecting of us.

Adaire and I are very, very much aligned on what we need to deliver for 2026, which was the low end of that range. Let me just leave it at that. The message was delivered, and we will respond accordingly.

John Acken, RBC: Customer retention, tell me a couple of words on that.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Churn for us, it ebbs and flows. I’ve said a couple of things with our investors today, but suffice it to say, I would love to see us get our churn rates down. Largely, as your base starts to increase, keeping a churn rate of 2% to 2.5% is generally in that range. It’s hard as the base gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Our goal is to find ways to get our churn % down. Right now, I’d say we’re not shifting our thoughts on that right now. I think the work that we’re doing on our analytics and reshaping our go-to-market positioning, just to give everybody a sense, our entire go-to-market plus the support functions are roughly about 3,000 employees, 2,500 to 3,000 employees. You want to make sure everybody’s selling from the right vantage point.

I think obviously there’s work that we can do to make sure that we do better. At the same time, work on the churn analytics and get the predictive behaviors of our customers analyzed through an AI lens that will help us get ahead of it. I think that’s going to be an opportunity for us as well. Maybe not over the next couple of quarters, but as we look into 2026 and beyond, I think it will pay dividends for us.

John Acken, RBC: As more workloads become associated with AI, whether it’s from hyperscale customers that also reside in your data centers or enterprise, how does the traditional kind of latency value prop of Equinix play into what you see as the coming wave of AI inference workloads?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Yeah. Look, I like, you know, I don’t think I’m wrong in this assumption. I liken it very much to the advent of cloud and just where cloud was going. A lot of compute was done in locations, but at some point, you need to aggregate or deliver an availability zone or aggregation node or network node. I think that holds true for AI as well. The models will get trained, and whether they’re sovereign or foundational, or frontier-oriented models, they will continue to develop over time across different markets and across different regions of the world. They will eventually need to converge, and inference will become a bigger part of it. I thought we’re pretty clear that we’ll be the beneficiary of inference, less about training and sovereign models. It doesn’t mean that we won’t create value from that.

I just think that’s not really where our sweet spot is. Having the diversity of network, the diversity, pardon me, the diversity of cloud on-ramp, the cable landing stations, both origination and termination, these all play into a strategy. You can get into satellite and the like, that I think we’re going to be the best representation of that opportunity as we continue to work with customers to distribute the AI opportunities. Let me give you another example. You’ve heard us talk about it. We’re really excited about just what Grok’s doing with us around the globe. That’s just the front edge of these opportunities. If they get it right, then we got it right because that is where inference will start to accelerate. There are more and more companies that will start to look more like them.

Not to mention there’s the GPU as a service, the private AI clouds, there are all the service providers that are going to have AI-oriented solutions. It’s the culmination of all of those that I think will make a difference for Equinix because we are low latency, because we have the on-ramps, we have the networks, we have the latency-sensitive environments.

John Acken, RBC: It sounds like in the early innings of this journey, it’s identifiable as inference because Groq, G-R-O-Q, obviously, that’s their business model, inference as a service. You’ve got tech companies that are driving this. Where is the enterprise? You mentioned the analogy with cloud. As enterprises start to do inference within their own environments, do you have a view yet as to how soon that might happen? Early days? Any early kind of reference cases that you can cite?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: I think we feel 2027 is going to be a real turning point for the industry as it relates to inference. That all said, we have reference points whether it’s the large pharma bioscience companies that are doing local AI, sort of AI private clouds that are very much in the used GPU clusters to optimize basically research and development and output. You see that to other companies that are in the services space that are selling basically their services to enterprises. Again, that’s the front edge of, I think, the beginning of opportunity. You’re starting to see liquid cooling applications go into our environment. We’re liquid cool available, but you want to see the consumption of that type of architecture because that tells you of the realness of what’s coming into play.

The other part I would say is that not all AI, let me say this differently, not all AI deployments need to be liquid cooled. A lot of it can be air cooled depending on the concentration. That’s, again, an indication of we cater to a wide array of customers with different parameters that need to live in a co-located or multi-tenanted data center environment. We’re not selling to one customer that architects itself uniquely that has to compete with everybody else in the space. That’s why we have a different offering inside the retail space versus the xScale space, which creates a host of other issues.

John Acken, RBC: On xScale, you’ve got a lot of deep-pocketed competitors that are willing to take leverage higher, that might be willing to build even bigger than, say, 240 megawatts. How do you sort of see the competitive landscape? Is demand such that you don’t focus so much on the competition, or is it a factor that you have to kind of contemplate?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: I think it is fair to say, I mean, we’re a public company, and you have to live within the confines of what a public company can and cannot do. When you have a shareholder in a private equity environment that is willing to take their tolerance up to 10x or 15x, that’s OK because it’s short-lived and they can monetize off of that. We can’t do that in the public environment. We focus on what we can do. That’s the comfort of realizing that we can’t compete maybe head-to-head, but we have our joint ventures and we have really strong partners. GIC is an awesome partner. CPP is an awesome partner. PGIM is an awesome partner. There are other partners out there that we can potentially do business with.

It’s the recognition that we will need to partner with somebody to make sure that we can accelerate the growth opportunity in front of us. We’re already between Hampton and then the other sites we’re talking about, and I’m only talking about three sites. That would be all that in itself, if we execute against that over the not too distant, that would deliver over one gigawatt of capacity. We’re only scratching the surface as a company. I think you’re going to see Equinix start to accelerate, largely because of how we’re investing and what we’re doing to shift the emphasis in the xScale environment.

John Acken, RBC: Time for one quick question, if there is one from the audience.

Unidentified speaker: I know you’re planning, you’re hosting an AI Summit next week in headquarters. What are you planning?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Yeah, we are hosting an AI Summit really to provide some investors, the community, potential customers, the hyperscalers, the opportunity to understand how we’re going to approach the AI initiative and why we think we’re going to be very relevant as we look forward in the future. It’s some about technology, some about understanding just what we’re doing and where we’re doing it, and then also just the depth of our team.

John Acken, RBC: Question at the end? Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Ferry Hotel is a good fit that you guys have built a lot of good investment business on. As these carrier hotel assets are aging, they’re reaching their seed limitations. How are you going to sort of future-proof this entry of AI productivity requirements? What does that look like? The carriers are there.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: The beauty is that we have the carrier.

John Acken, RBC: The question is about older carrier hotel assets and how you future-proof yourself.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Yeah, I think number one, those networks aren’t going away. Two, we have Equinix Fabric, which basically connects all the sites together as if they’re one. Three, the density factor in a carrier hotel is very different than basically a high compute environment. We have capacity that’s available. To the extent we don’t, we’re building around it, making sure that we connect the assets. Simply put, we typically have built them in campuses or proximate to a campus. We have the ability to grow and scale. You don’t need to per se future-proof it in the sense that you sell the right customer with the right application in the right center, and you’re not going to put a large AI or cloud-oriented workload in a network data center. We have the ability to continue to sell. Our goal is looking for ways to augment those carrier hotels where we can.

John Acken, RBC: You mentioned Equinix Fabric. It’s obviously not a very capital-intensive product. Just within that segment, is it growing at kind of a steady pace, or is there any reason to think that the growth rate around Equinix Fabric would either accelerate or decelerate?

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: I don’t think it should decelerate, but I think it is a steady rate, but we want to see it accelerate. That’s part of our goal for 2026.

John Acken, RBC: Very good. Thank you for your time.

Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer, Equinix: Thank you.

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