Equinix at Nareit REITweek: Strategic Expansion and AI Focus

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) shared its strategic vision at the Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference. The company outlined its global expansion plans and technological advancements, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. Equinix emphasized its "build bolder" strategy, catering to the growing demand for high-density deployments, while addressing sustainability and operational efficiencies.

Key Takeaways

• Equinix plans to expand its global footprint, with new deals in The Philippines and potential expansions in Africa.
• The "build bolder" strategy focuses on fewer, larger facilities to meet customer demands efficiently.
• The company is adapting to AI and edge computing trends, enhancing its infrastructure for high-density deployments.
• Sustainability is a priority, with a shift towards liquid cooling technologies and exploring alternative energy sources.
• Internal streamlining efforts have improved sales cycle efficiencies.

Global Presence and Strategy

Equinix’s extensive global reach, with 260 data centers in over 70 markets, is a significant competitive advantage. Over 60% of its revenue is generated outside the United States, and 64% comes from customers deployed across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions. The company is reducing barriers to foreign markets and addressing data sovereignty concerns, particularly in EMEA. New market entries include a deal in The Philippines and exploration of opportunities in Africa, including South Africa.

Build Bolder Strategy and Demand

Equinix’s "build bolder" strategy involves constructing fewer but larger facilities, enhancing capital efficiency and meeting customer needs for larger deployments, ranging from 0.5 to over 5 megawatts. The company is accelerating development at key sites like NY3, DC16, and LD4, with XScale facilities being 85% pre-leased. Customer demand and power constraints drive expansion into adjacent markets such as Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

XScale Business

The XScale business is expanding with a $15 billion joint venture in North America and land procurement outside Atlanta. The portfolio now exceeds 2 gigawatts of capacity globally. Challenges include power constraints and regulatory hurdles, but the company is focused on building ecosystems in metro areas and mitigating risks through strategic underwriting.

AI and High-Density Deployments

Equinix is shifting its focus from traditional communication to data and AI workloads. Facilities are equipped to handle varying power densities, with liquid cooling becoming essential for deployments above 25 kilowatts. The company has signed AI-related deals with firms like Block, NVIDIA, and Grok, offering pre-configured stacks for AI development and inferencing. The hybrid AI model is evolving, with a focus on edge computing and distributed infrastructure.

Sustainability and Cooling Technologies

Equinix is advancing its sustainability efforts by moving away from water-consuming cooling technologies and prioritizing water usage efficiency. Liquid cooling systems are being architected for high-density deployments, while alternative energy sources such as nuclear and natural gas are being explored. Heat dispersion initiatives include heating Olympic swimming pools and greenhouses.

Sales Cycle Efficiencies

Internal streamlining has reduced touch points in the sales cycle, avoiding lengthy negotiations for smaller deployments and enabling quicker customer deployments.

Supply Chain and Tariffs

Equinix is managing supply chain constraints through strong vendor relationships and proactive equipment ordering. The company is also monitoring the implications of US tariffs on its operations.

In conclusion, Equinix’s strategic initiatives at the Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference demonstrate its commitment to global expansion, technological innovation, and sustainability. For further details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference:

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: All right. You ready to rock and roll?

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s jump in a minute early. Everybody awake after lunch? All right.

I’m John Peterson. I lead the Reed team at Jefferies. I’ve covered Equinix for, I don’t know, a long time. Happy to have Steve Madden and Phil Kanezny Yeah. With us.

I’m going to let you guys introduce yourself. I think you had to read a compliance disclaimer today. Yes. I’ll it over to you there.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: I’ll do the obligatory compliance read, which is some of what we’ll be talking about today, Kanezny’s forward looking statements. Please read our SEC filings for information about factors that could affect these statements. Yes, I’m Philip Kanesny. I’m the Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization. I’ve been with the company for fourteen years.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Steve Madden. I’m the Vice President of Global Technical Advisory. I advise customers and partners on their infrastructure, and I’ve been with the company almost eleven years.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Alright. Great. So why don’t we start maybe just a little more of an introductory question. So you guys have about 260 data centers across more than 70 markets worldwide. Maybe help everybody in the room kind of understand how your global presence benefits customers and what strategic advantages that extensive footprint provides.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes, thanks. Yes, I mean, first of all, it’s one of, I think, of the core tenets of what we see as a real differentiator for us in the marketplace, having the global presence that we have. In addition, we’ve cultivated these rich ecosystems in most of those metros as well. And then the third element is really our reliability that we provide to our customers. So we see those as all kind of core building blocks of our kind of core differentiation.

Yes. And I think the global presence that we’ve had has served us incredibly well, especially as we have been serving more multinational customers over the course of our twenty six year history. If you look at some of the statistics of we’ve got over 60% of our revenues comes outside of The United States today. And that when we look at our customer diversification and how they’re diversifying their deployments, over 75% of our revenues come from customers who are deployed in more than one metro. And even when we look at across all three regions, we’ve got 64% of our revenues come from customers who are deployed across all three regions that we’re in.

So it’s really been a key differentiator for us, again, as we think about where customers are looking there to architect their IT infrastructure. And then you throw in things like data sovereignty and other events which are incredibly relevant in in especially in places like EMEA, you know, and having presence in so many markets there has has really served us well. But now, Steve, any other thoughts on how the companies are looking to architect and

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Well, it’s it’s they wanna do business in all three regions, but I think we reduce the barrier to foreign markets dramatically. So even small companies can be in 30 countries within a year leveraging one common provider and partner for the ecosystem.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. Great. On the last earnings call, you guys mentioned accelerating your build, your development process at, I think, NY3, DC16 and LD4 kind of pushed them up by a year. What are some of the utilization rates and pre leasing levels at those facilities that kind of caused the push up? And maybe just talk about the kind of the level of demand that’s, I guess, pushing more of a proactive approach to development.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes, sure. I mean, I think this really absolutely ties into what we’ve stated as our build bolder strategy, right, which is to build probably fewer but larger builds as we think about things. And more importantly, instead of used to build in more modular chunks in a given metro and now to build that larger footprint in a more capital efficient way is part of it. It also really is giving us a better ability to serve some of these customers’ needs of larger footprint demands that we’re seeing across the enterprises. So think of kind of the half a megawatt to five plus megawatt type of deployments.

They’re not hyperscalers, they’re not ready for kind of our X scale, but more deployments that where, again, these enterprises are looking to take down more capacity. And importantly, where they’ve got growth runway so that they know that they can grow into that. So that’s really kind of behind this whole notion of building boulder and kind of building in these bigger phases and therefore kind of that’s what we were kind of referring to when we said kind of pull forward. It’s really set of building it in two different phases, we’re going to do it in one phase and a bigger one bigger deployment really to again be able to satisfy the growth needs of our customers.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Helpful. And I guess when you make the decision to build, I mean how much space do you try to pre lease ahead of time or are you building most of it on a speculative basis?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes, obviously, we’re different than a lot of the kind of the wholesale community, which does a lot more pre leasing. We do that definitely in our X scale facilities, right? So when we were 85% of the capacity that we brought online X scale is pre leased. The retail world is a little bit different, right? We’re building kind of in metros that we know well, and so we kind of have a really good sense of the demand environment and the uptake rates.

And so we don’t have we don’t do as much pre leasing. I will say though now because of a lot of the power constraints that we’re seeing in certain key metros, we are being more proactive about pre leasing. And before, we used to look kind of three to six months before a facility would open and start to look at where we can pre lease that to some key critical customers magnets for us. We’re actually extending that timeframe now, got to more nine, twelve month timeframes where we can get some pre leasing activity, but it’s not like the last time we’re pre leasing half the building in our retail facilities, that’s just a little bit that’s kind of not we need to see and not how we kind of plan.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. I kind of mentioned before you guys are in 70 markets right now, but it seems like you’re always entering new markets every year or two. Can you talk about the key factors that drive that decision making of entering new markets?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes. I’ll start. One, it starts with our customers, right? Where do our customers need us, want us and where are they looking to grow? That’s the first thing.

And then the other dynamic that’s playing out more frequently across the globe now as we’re seeing around the power some of the power constraints. And the best example is to look at Singapore where there’s real constraints there. And so we’ve been looking at adjacent markets that we can go to, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur where we can and Johor, where we can build out additional adjacency metros where there’s actually power that we can procure. So that’s been another driver as well as looking at that. But number one is our customers and where they’re looking for and where we see real communities of interest and ecosystems that we can build off of.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Are there any maybe just broadly, are there any places, corners of the globe where you guys would like to expand further?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes, mean we’ve announced a deal in The Philippines recently as you’ve seen and that was kind of new markets and I mentioned some of the new markets in APAC. I mean we’re always kind of looking at where that next kind of corner of the globe may be, nothing that’s, I would say, a big missing major gap on the map. We just recently have talked about going into South Africa, and I think so I think there could be further activity ultimately as we build out our presence in Africa, but early days on that front.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yes. Okay.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: All right. That’s helpful. So I want to talk about XScale for a minute. So XScale is your hyperscale development business. You guys launched a $15,000,000,000 joint venture here in North America late last year.

Maybe can you talk about some of the milestones that you’ve reached so far? What kind of returns you’re expecting and how long we should expect $15,000,000,000 to take to be deployed?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: That’s a good question. Mean, listen, so we’re we’ve started off on the scale business here in Americas, as you said, with the announcement of this JV. We’ve procured land in the outside the Atlanta area, we’re calling the Hampton facility. And so we’re well down the path on that front. And I would say we’re building a healthy portfolio or pipeline of opportunities.

Obviously, you got to start with getting the right land and then powered land, importantly, to be able to fuel the demand that we’re seeing there. And so we’re building that portfolio and pipeline of opportunities, and we’ll kind of announce those as we start to execute on that. But overall, in the XScale facility, this will bring our total portfolio of XScale business up to over two gigawatts of capacity when we look across the entire portfolio globally. So we’re excited about kind of our ability to kind of help our help hyperscalers and continue to grow those communities of interest.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. I guess, what are some of the, I guess, risks and challenges on meeting that growth? Obviously, power, we read all the time about power being really constrained. I think the regulatory environment can also be a challenge. Can you talk about some of those challenges domestically and abroad, if you could?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes. Mean, obviously, the power dynamics and all the and as you mentioned, the regulatory pieces are all the permitting that’s got to come along with that and the time frame to get that. And what we’re seeing oftentimes is not even where we’re talking about the power constraints. It’s not that we can’t see line of sight to the generation of the power, but it’s oftentimes the distribution of the power and how it gets to those sites and facilities is some of the challenges that I think the whole industry is for sure is wrestling with. That’s why you’re seeing folks who are going kind of further afield in different areas.

We may not have thought of as a data rich data center environment. But for us, we also want to be still thinking about areas that are still kind of near the major metros. And that’s critical to I think how we think about what our customers are looking for and ultimately how we’re building again the ecosystems around oftentimes these hyperscale deployments.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. Maybe just dwell on that for a minute in terms of the guys that are building far afield that talk to some of these companies sometimes. Like, I guess how do you think about broadly of your strategy of, I don’t know, being in North Dakota versus Northern Virginia and even as you build out your ex scale business?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes. I think the biggest thing we probably really think about is kind of releasing risk, right, around that. And so you can sign up one customer and get a get that deal, get the project obviously built and commissioned. But when you think about we’re here we’re in it for the long term, right? I mean that’s one of the things I think that we’re I’ve always been saying about the portfolio in our XScale business as well is that we’re not just developing them to kind of sell it, but really to kind of build that ecosystem kind of around it.

And so that’s why we’re focused on the metros that we’re focused on. And then again, thinking about from an underwriting perspective, what that releasing risk really looks like is something that is really critical to us as well.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Okay. All

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: right. And this is Steven, I may bring you on this. So, I guess, about how customer needs are evolving, maybe specifically in X scale, but also curious on the colo business in terms of power density as we’re trying to build out these these AI workloads.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Sure. Well, I mean, generally, it started a lot a lot of the infrastructure deployment with Equinix was into communication, interconnection and networking, which is very low dense cabinets, very high connectivity. And of course, now we’re moving into the data age and the AI age and the learning models and training, which is very power hungry and very cabinet oriented. And so we’ve got a mix of of locations that we have had in the retail business where your connectivity should go here, this other data element should go over here. An ex scale is once you’ve gone past a certain threshold, you really pushed yourself into that bucket now and you need to go there.

In all cases, we look at the workload deployment type and and the characteristics around what they wanna deploy. And depending on the density of what they’re looking to deploy is what implementation we would wrap around that. So all of our facilities are are prepped and and ready to handle us to be able to accommodate those different deployments. But if it’s, you know, around the range of maybe 10 kilowatts up to, 25 kilowatts, typically cooling still just fine. In some cases, you’d even do liquid cooling cabinet doors and things like that to offset any any facility required implications.

Once you go way above that, it’s typically a form of liquid cooling.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Whether that’s gonna be done liquid cooling in the cage or liquid cooling on chip, it depends on the implementation. A lot of the newer NVIDIA gear, DGX and things like that are all self contained liquid cooling on chip. And that’s a different infrastructure. It doesn’t require, you know, air conditioning and cooling the same way as other facilities do. And we basically make sure that, like I said, we architect for the ability to adapt to what’s going to be commonly asked for in that space and then implement the infrastructure required to do that.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. So when you think about building, we talked earlier how the next phase, you don’t often do a lot of pre leasing. I’m thinking talking about the retail business. How do you kind of future proof that for where we’re headed?

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yeah. Well, if anything, we’re lucky that we have a campus of buildings. And so you can have one building tooled up ready to go for the high density and mix of the others. And so again, a lot of our customers have come to the realization that they don’t have to have all of their deployment in one cage, in one building where they can see it and, you know, hug it. Now it can be sort of distributed amongst different places in the building where it makes more sense, especially when it enables them to grow that deployment.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: So we’ve had a lot of conversations like, okay, it’s whatever it is today, but what is this gonna look like in three years? Right. Well, it’s gonna be this big. Well, then don’t put it there. Let’s let’s go and stick it over here.

Right. So it’s basically the right workload with the right price point in the right facility.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. I guess I’m curious in the X scale business, we see headlines about some of the hyperscalers delaying construction projects because they’re having to reconfigure how they do the cooling and all of that. Are you seeing that as you’re doing builds for hyperscalers in the xScale business? Are they, like, figuring it out as you go, I guess?

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: I think I think it’s not so much figuring as we go. It’s like where’s the tipping point where you’re predominantly gonna be deploying more of that kind of infrastructure Right. Which case you might architect more line towards that. Yeah. A common example of that would be rather than tool how we distribute liquid cooling infrastructure to a cage, every cage has a conduit of liquid cooling infrastructure already there, and as they deploy you tap into it.

That’s a fundamental shift from adding liquid cooling to no, it’s going to be liquid cooling by design

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Mhmm.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: And backing out. I think you’ll find that generally once you reach that certain threshold of either PUE and WE efficiency, power use usage efficiency, water usage efficiency, liquid cooling in in that infrastructure is more efficient. This is more expensive.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: As we reach to the scale of deployment where it makes sense to do it that way because you’re gonna get the return back on scale. That’s why we should do that way.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Do do you have a sense of some of the x scale builds? Maybe you can talk about how it’s evolved over time. Like how much of the use case is just pure AI training versus some hybrid of traditional cloud workloads and maybe some inference and a you know, talk about that. Yeah.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yeah. So, I mean, I know I know Gen A and LLM and everything was kind of these bombshell massive megawatt deployments. There’s actually very few of those. Yeah. Most of the use cases happening in in enterprise and even with other than GPU as a service, which is just pretty providing capacity, are mostly around more targeted use case specifics.

So they’re trying to train a model that’s gonna do building efficiency for energy usage, or they’re trying to do visual computing for facial recognition or number plate or or license plate recognition. And those tools get trained, but once they’re trained, they don’t need quite as large a model. You’re not training it on the entire Internet. You’re training it to do a very specific thing. Right.

And once you see the models get developed to do specific things, they start connecting them together and building bigger solutions. So it’s not actually gonna eventuate that we’re gonna have 500 or 600 large language models like GPG four. It’s not gonna happen. If anything, it’s gonna be a a plethora of portfolio of smaller models that do specific things that are applied to the operational usage of that company cares about. And they won’t even necessarily have to train it because if it already exists and you just get it from a model as a service company like or even from a video and just drop it in and run with it, you’d rather do that than go and train it all yourself.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Do you have a sense of, like, what the power requirements are of that sort of inferencing workload that you’re talking about?

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Much smaller. If anything, in some cases, lot of these models don’t require GPUs at all. CPUs are perfectly fine. And we got TPUs and Grok and other chip technology service that are very specific to use cases. They’re just

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: fine.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: And also the the infrastructure is distributed now. So you actually have infrastructure in different metro cities that’s handling maybe a dozen or a couple of hundred stores. You don’t have to bring all of that back to like a central hub. You’re able to push it out and distribute it a little bit. So we see infrastructure, you know, growing in the edge in edge computing spaces that way.

But it’s it’s the computational analysis of it is more how do I process real time telemetry or more real time based data Yeah. And make my inferencing decision and less about huge amounts of volumes of of data that needs to be used to train the model to understand what it’s doing in the first place.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: So it’s it’s very much a a an operational deployment, not a academic sort of deployment.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Right. Which gets back to, I think, some of the advantages we’ve got being, you know, so distributed across, you know, 75 markets around the world and where these things start to get aggregated. And again, smaller, you know, inference level applications, you know, where we can, you know, play really well.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yeah. Okay. When it involves humans, trying to make them more efficient stuff, it can all run from cloud or from the regional centers. Yeah. But anything that’s operational technology oriented that’s not human related, you see that getting deployed to

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: So, until they deploy it in their operations and start seeing either efficiencies or improvements or throughput or something, they’re not getting paid back on what that investment on AI was.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Maybe just staying on this topic. So, on the last earnings call, you guys don’t often name the names of your customers you signed deals with, but you made a point of talking about you signed some AI related deals with Block and NVIDIA and Grok.

So, can you maybe talk a little bit more about how those AI deployments, maybe how they differ in design to traditional workloads and kind of what the opportunity is with those kind of customers?

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Sure. Well, obviously, a lot of it is related to providing pre deployed, pre configured stacks for AI development and and inferencing as well. And some some of those cases, you know, it could be a GPU as a service where they’re just simply hosting the capacity in proximity to connecting it to your own data and your own cloud instances, etcetera. So that just becomes part of their environment and they subscribe to what they need. And over time, they may not know what that’s gonna look like.

So it doesn’t make make sense to buy it all yourself if you’re not really sure what the long term sizing is gonna be. So instead of you can use cloud, sure, but then these other GPU as a service or another acronym is NVIDIA cloud providers, NCPs, can provide you these kinds of services for while you’re moving through that development cycle to figure out what your steady state’s gonna look like. Okay. And we’re finding that because there was a supply constraint and because there’s different models that are tailored towards different industries for specific cases, you’re gonna see a marketplace show up. Yeah.

And so we we’re starting to make sure the foundation for connectivity, data distribution, and local government sovereignty, having GPU as a service available for our customers, and then bring in all the software stack sort of companies. That’s when we say ecosystem, it’s not just networks and clouds. It’s like who are they actually gonna need?

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Right.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: And do we have them in the in the building ready for them to go?

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: I mean, it’s it’s it’s starting to remind me of the early days of the cloud. Right? Where initially, it was the big hyperscalers building large buildings, then they did all these on ramps, which they naturally put a lot of them in your data centers. And then and then hybrid cloud became a huge demand driver for you guys, not just the cloud companies, but the enterprises.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: That’s right.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Is what you’re describing hybrid AI? Yes. And then that’s what’s the the that that’s is that the is that the right buzzword or is that a

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: different one? I’m starting off maybe developing in the cloud, but then I’ve gotta actually roll it out into the field and you need an infrastructure Right. To do that. And we are we are not only helping, you know, cloud providers with their space and connectivity, but we brought all the enterprises to them. Right.

So that’s the customer base. And so we’re doing the same thing now with the Nvidia and and GPU as a service. Okay. Alright.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Great. I’ve got a few more questions, but if anybody does have a question, you can feel free to raise your hand. But let me jump into one more here and then we’ll take questions from the audience. So, you guys have pointed, like in your most recent earnings call, you talked about more substantial sales cycle efficiencies and conversion improvements. Can you maybe just talk a little bit more about those improvements?

Is that structural? Is that temporary? How should we think about?

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes. I mean, think we absolutely think that’s structural, right? I mean, we’re doing a lot of things internally to try to we talked about this notion of both serving better, which is how we serve our customers more efficiently and effectively and make them get them quicker to time for deployment, which benefits them as well. And also just how we run simpler internally, right? And so I think a lot of what we’re trying to put in place now is how do we shorten those cycles, reduce the touch points.

We talked about I think Adaire referenced this on the earnings call that even simple things like are we going to be entering into long drawn out negotiations with deployments that are below a certain size threshold, right? And we’ve stopped that And so that’s just taken a lot of friction out of the system. And again, benefits our customers, it benefits us internally to help get us quicker to revenue generation as And so we’re going to continue to look for opportunities, and we see that there’s many to be able to continue to streamline our business internally and also to get and serve our customers in a more efficient way. So that’s why we think it’s structural in nature as we’re changing kind of fundamentally how we think about, again, going with to our customers and how we’re going to service them.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Okay. Alright. Do you have any questions from the audience? The question is on different cooling technologies and how nuclear energy might factor into that? I think it does.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yeah. Power and cooling, I think it was both in there. So Yeah. There’s different cooling technologies being used in our facilities today. Clearly we’re trying to move away from ones that consume water and we’re happy to say that our WE which is our water usage efficiency is some of the best in the industry.

The reason why that’s important is because power unit efficiency and water unit efficiency, you need both to understand how well a data center is doing their job because it’s really easy to make power unit efficiency look good and make this look terrible if you’re not reporting on it. But so yes, that’s a big deal for us. But I think it’s what’s more interesting is that the industry is driving towards newer technologies like liquid cooling, which doesn’t require HVAC and water based evaporation based technologies because it’s required in order to move that much heat. So the old the old way we had it doesn’t even work anymore. You have to have a new a newer way of doing it.

So we’re we’re already in a place where that’s what I was saying with the tipping point with when is it typically all going to be more liquid cooling than than even evaporative or heat based. We’re seeing a shift as the densities get higher to round, you know, if we start to look at it, if it’s over maybe 15 kilowatts or 20 kilowatts, we start going down the path of, well, this is just gonna grow. So why don’t we architect for that in advance? Right? So we are absolutely all over that.

And it’s not typically water. I guess why keep using the word liquid. And a lot of them are closed systems too, so it’s not consuming liquid. For the nuclear and power distribution, we’re obviously very interested in anything related to energy, alternative energy, and and green energy all over the planet. We’re exploring different things in different countries.

We have some things running already like fuel cells, blooming things in different facilities, trialing and getting them going. None of them are at the stage where we don’t need a utility provider to still provide power. We have looked at what’s happening with alternatives like hydrogen, etcetera, and I think as a as a as a the the inspiration around nuclear, although it’s it’s naming, it’s marketing, is gonna be a problem, is that it’s actually a very efficient way to create new supply of energy in location to where there’s already a problem. So the distribution problem of the grid can be overlooked a little bit, which means you can get the benefit of it relatively soon comparative to building out piping for hydrogen all over the country would take decades. Right?

So if you can reuse the existing infrastructure and solve the problem of the capacity gap relatively soon, that helps not just from our own supply perspectives, but even for our sustainability goals because it is offsetting power we would have used somewhere else. So we’re very interested in that. We’re watching what happens in the market. We’re alongside everybody else trying to drive for these technologies to come to fruition, but we don’t have control over when that’s gonna be. Okay.

Well, I think that’s I have a question. Talk about water and power. With turbines, kind of in turn measured, fueling, liquefied natural gas,

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, like, the viability of natural gas, some of these more mobile use cases of it.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: Yeah. So, I mean, for for this it’s different in every region and even in every country as to what you can and can’t do in the first place. And then to your point, is it even worth it or not? It’s It’s hard to say. I think when we look at it, one of the ways I’ve seen this used is rather than think about it as an alternative to utility, can it offset how much we’re drawing from the utility?

Or can it help provide a better alternative backup? If the utility went dark and we had to run on our own generation of power, how much could that help us there? And so it’s probably like where can we use it, you know, effectively? But as a mainstream alternative, right now, it’s the two junior or inferior for the purposes of replacing the need for utility power. And like I said before, hydrogen is very exciting, but we would have to plumb a giant pipe of hydrogen to our data centers and because you can’t bring it in on a truck every day.

That’s just not gonna work.

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: But with natural but natural gas, it’s obviously that’s that’s, you know, plumbed a little bit more in in many in many areas. And so and listen. We’re we are looking, you know, at at on-site power generation as both a bridge for sure. There are metros where more in EMEA where we have deployed that as a technology to get the power there. And it’s been been working great for us.

So it is definitely a technology we’re continuing to look at more aggressively.

Steve Madden, Vice President of Global Technical Advisory, Equinix: That’s right. And as I said, in Europe, however, not so much. Gas isn’t a good alternative, but it depends. I think the other thing that’s interesting is cooling and finding other ways to disperse heat hasn’t maybe got as much press as it should, but we’ve been heating Olympic swimming pools, food and green greenhouses and things to try and grow food. We’re doing a lot of other things that weren’t really, you know, on the cards, you know, a year or so ago that I think will help and contribute to the end.

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: Tariff implications and supply chain on

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: Yes, I mean just quickly I’ll touch on the supply chain obviously that’s we’ve been dealing with supply chain constraints for a few years now and but it’s something that as being one of the biggest providers and consumers of this equipment, we’ve got great relationships with lots of vendors and so we’re well ahead of the supply chain with regards to how long we’re ordering it well in advance to make sure when we need it delivered on-site that we’ve managed that appropriately. But it’s definitely it’s a challenge our procurement team is dealing with on a regular basis to make sure that we’ve got the kind of the long pole and the tent solved for right and figured out. And then on the tariff side, again, you know, knowing that, you know, that’s just affecting right now on The US side, and it’s

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: a

Philip Kanesny, Senior Vice President of the Finance Organization, Equinix: very

John Peterson, Lead of the Reed Team, Jefferies: fluid

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