Equinix at TD Cowen Summit: Strategic Expansion in Data Centers

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) presented at the TD Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit, outlining its strategic initiatives and operational challenges. The company is focusing on scaling its data center capacity to meet rising demand, with an emphasis on flexibility and capital efficiency. While energy and supply chain issues pose challenges, Equinix is adapting its strategies to maintain growth.

Key Takeaways

• Equinix is expanding its data center capacity, shifting from 10 MW builds to 30-60 MW, with plans for multi-100 MW campuses.
• The company is addressing energy challenges with a proactive approach, including on-site generation and utility partnerships.
• Equinix’s revenue has grown approximately fivefold since 2012, with its market cap increasing by 7.5 times.
• The Build Bolder initiative focuses on strategic planning and execution to accommodate larger enterprise deals and hyperscale demands.
• Equinix is enhancing its construction management to ensure efficient project delivery.

Financial Results

• Equinix’s revenue has grown significantly since 2012, now approximately five times higher than the nearly 2 billion dollars reported back then.
• The company’s market cap has increased 7.5 times from its 10 billion dollars value in 2012, although it previously reached a 9x growth.

Operational Updates

• Equinix is adapting to increased demand by constructing larger data centers, moving from 10 MW buildings to structures in the 30-60 MW range.
• The company is enhancing its data center designs with higher rack densities, now averaging 12+ kW per cabinet, and preparing for liquid cooling solutions.
• Equinix is implementing a multi-pronged energy strategy, including building its own substations and exploring on-site generation options.

Future Outlook

• The Build Bolder initiative is central to Equinix’s future strategy, focusing on larger-scale builds and flexible, capital-efficient models.
• Equinix anticipates continued growth in AI and digital transformation, driving demand for increased capacity.
• The company is planning for various scenarios, ensuring preparedness for diverse market needs.

Q&A Highlights

• Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, emphasized the shift from just-in-time inventory management due to high demand.
• Abdo highlighted the complexity of modern construction projects, necessitating increased program management capabilities.
• Equinix’s engagement with utilities is crucial for securing reliable power supply, with a focus on flexibility in energy procurement.

In conclusion, Equinix’s strategic focus on expanding data center capacity and addressing operational challenges positions it well for future growth. For a detailed discussion, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit:

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Alright. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to TD Cowen’s eleventh annual communications infrastructure summit. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Michael Eisen, I am the comment for analyst here. For this session, we’re joined by Equinix. And from Equinix, we have Ralph Abdo, who’s our EVP of global operations.

This is structured as a fireside chat we have about forty minutes for it I have a ton of questions prepared this one I will I promise you I will open it up for questions but with that Ralph thank you so much for being here today I really appreciate it

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Thank you Michael. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: My understanding is that you have something to say before we get started.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: I do. Being a public company we have to start with, know, I’ll be making some forward looking statements And please be sure to check our SEC filings for any factors that may impact those forward looking statements.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: All right. Perfect.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Get that out of the way. Done. These two over here smickering because they weren’t part of public and now we’re private and so we don’t have to say that. Alright.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Well, let’s let’s jump into it. Ralph, you joined Equinix in 02/2012, but from my perspective, you’ve had a major impact on the company based on conversations that I’ve had with both current and prior Equinix executives. So for those who are less familiar with you, could you just give us an overview of your time at Equinix and a bit about your path to your currency?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Well, thank you for the kind words. So this month, I will reach my thirteen year anniversary with Equinix. For nostalgic reasons, I went back and looked a little bit at where was Equinix in 2012? And we were just under $2,000,000,000 in revenue. Our market cap was $10,000,000,000 And so in the span of that thirteen years, we’ve expanded and scaled and we’re, you know, revenues about 5x what we were back then.

And our market cap is depending on which day you pick for the stock price, which a few months ago was about 9x and it’s more like 7.5x right now, but we’ll get it back up to 9x, I think. So it’s been an incredible ride. I’ve got some former colleagues in the crowd and they’re familiar with the journey we’ve been on. And we’ve scaled a lot. We’ve expanded our geographic presence.

We’ve expanded our employee base. We’ve expanded our data center footprint. And it’s been a great ride. And I’ve had the privilege to lead our global operations function for about the last eight years of that. When I first joined the company, I ran the Americas operations.

Some of you in the crowd may remember Charles Myers. He was the president of The Americas at the time, and he’s he’s the one that hired me. He and I go back to our level three days together. So we’ve worked together prior to that. And then I I ran that for about five years.

And when we say operations at Equinix, it’s really about the build and operate portion of the data center. So it’s design, it’s construction. I currently have procurement energy, which I’m sure we will get to Oh, yeah. Some point in this conversation. And I also have the the team that runs the data centers day to day, maintaining the the facilities and the sites as well as supporting our customers every day.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Alright. Well, you’ve been and from what you just said, you’ve been in the seat in your current seat for a while. But I am curious, what are the strategic priorities for you right now and for the business over the near to medium term? And as part of that, I’m just curious, where are you spending most of your time these days?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yeah, I would say there’s been a bit of a shift for both the company as well as me personally. I would say I used to spend more of my time on the operate side of things. And I think anybody that’s in the data center space knows that you live on, you know, the stability of your service and your product, and that was not something you ever wanted to have disruption in. Most of our customers have mission critical deployments inside our data centers, and so maintaining reliability was always paramount and remains paramount for us. But my recent focus has gotten a lot more to be on the build side of things, partly because we’re investing at a higher level and partly because that space has become a little bit more challenging, both from an energy secured, you know, securing energy standpoint as well as supply chain.

So I spend the majority of my time, you know, on talent, energy, supply chain, and the strategic mapping and planning of what capacity we’re gonna build where. I think you’ve heard about the initiative that we call Build Bolder within the company. And so I lead that for the company in terms of the planning, the strategy, the investment profile, and probably most importantly, like, where are we gonna go, where are we gonna build, at what levels, at what pace, and what throughput. And then underpinning all that is how we actually going to execute do that build.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Then we’re going to have a this is going to be fun then. So I want to talk to you about something that we started out today talking about on stage which is deal sizes particularly we’ve seen enterprise deal sizes increase we’ve also seen obviously on the hyperscale side deal sizes increase. We’re going to put aside rack densities for a second but as we think about your Build Boulder initiative you know one of the things that I think underpins it is that hey look that your typical enterprise deal has gotten larger and as part of that the construction motion and the the standard capacity that you build needs to grow in size in order to accommodate that large that larger deal. I’m curious in the in your time in the seat have you how have enterprise deal sizes evolved? And as part of that, what were the changes that you made to your standard design in terms of the number of megawatts per building or per phase?

How has that evolved?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yeah. Absolutely. So in my time, all of those dimensions have increased over the years. When I first joined Equinix, we were building 10 megawatt buildings. And that was, at the time, a really big thing.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Those were big, yeah.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: We wouldn’t dream of building a 10 megawatt data center today. We’re in the 30 to 60 sort of range for any given building. And then we’re clustering them together in campuses to build multi 100 megawatt campuses. And so we very much historically in a retail space were building just in time inventory and being very frugal with the capital that we were investing. And we were also expanding in many, many locations simultaneously, so you couldn’t sort of concentrate that investment in fewer locations.

And so we were managing that capacity in, call it, four or five megawatt chunks. What we’ve been finding over the course of the last few years is by the time we finished the phase, we were selling it out, we were starting the next phase. And so we’ve changed that model a bit so that it’s more capital efficient, it’s easier on our supply chain, it’s easier on the people that are managing the projects. And so we’re moving away from the notion of it’s going to be just in time because it’s really hard to manage that way. And in the days of building a four or five megawatt chunk, selling a two megawatt to customer right out of the gate, you’re almost out of capacity the day you finish.

And so certainly in our really high demand markets, Ashburn, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, we’re building ten, twenty, 30 megawatt bases. And the buildings are bigger too. And when we say bigger, this is always a confused point. When we say bigger, we don’t mean the building is bigger. In fact, the building’s smaller.

What’s bigger is the power. But what’s interesting is you still need roughly the same amount of land because the infrastructure consumes more space now. But the core and shell is actually, if anything, shrinking because the density is going and so you pack more power into that particular building.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: So if we’re starting with the building size it’s a 10 now we’re talking 30 to 60 we’ll get to the phases in a second but to that last point that you made about the footprint shrinking obviously the rack the average rack density that you’re architecting these data centers to is increasing. So as part of that, you know, how are you thinking about the standard rack density that you designed the data center to currently? And I’m more curious, how does that compare to what we saw before the beginning of this AI demand boom? I’d say, let’s call it 2022, 2023. How has that average rack density that you built to evolved?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: I would say five years ago, we were thinking about six kW a cabinet. Okay. I would say even before the AI sort of change in the dynamic, we had stepped that up to about maybe eight. Okay. And now we’re thinking 12 plus on average.

And I think the average is a really important point because not every cabinet is going to be 12 or even the big numbers that we hear about, 100, the 150, those are gonna be a portion of those cabinets. And so what we sort of designed for is an average and the capability to increase that average with more infrastructure as needed to future proof for those data centers. What’s also interesting is in today’s data center design, the ability to support concentrated heat load is much better than it used to be. I’ll give you a couple of simple examples of how to articulate that. So in the days where we used raised floor, it was much harder to deliver a concentrated amount of cooling capacity to a given cabinet.

But we don’t use raised floors anymore and industry pretty much is away from it. And I would venture to say we pioneered that. But in addition to that, the way a data center is designed today is the room is one giant plenum, as we would call it. And so what that does is gives you the ability not to have to manage hotspots the same way. In the past, you had to be really careful where you put hotspots.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: In the days of Ray’s Floor, you literally had to redirect air. Well, if the whole thing is a plenum, it completely changes how you manage cooling and the ability to have twenty, thirty kW here and five or 10 right next to it, and the room can be balanced a lot easier with the type of cooling design and infrastructure that we’re putting in data centers these days.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: You know when you say 12 kW per cabinet, the first thing that comes to mind is, well, when I think of the super high densities that you hear NVIDIA talk about, right, obviously this is this is much lower. But then the next thing I think about is, well, you’re much better off stranding shell than you are having no space in the in the data center and just like, running out of power. So from my per from my perspective, it’s is the reason why you’re building at twelve so that is because you still see there’s plenty of opportunity in that call at six to ten. That’s going to be the standard, but you have the ability to flex up and new cooling solutions have made it easier for you to be able to support those loads. Is that the right way to think about it?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Absolutely the right way. And I would say to add to that, we have to have the ability to flex. But as with any business, you don’t want to over deploy capital and you don’t want to strand capital. So we don’t want to build for 30 today and have that be stranded. The other important dimension to what you’re describing is if we get to the point that we’re having to support throughout big numbers, seventy, eighty, 100 kW per cab, you’re immediately moving into the liquid cooling space.

Yeah. In which case you aren’t relying on that air distribution that’s in that plenum, as I described it, you’re moving into liquid cooling. And the beauty of today’s design is it still leverages the same chilled water loop. It just takes it from the central plant into a unit that’s gonna deliver a liquid versus taking it to an air handler that’s So gonna deliver a lot of the same common infrastructure. It’s all about how you manage and flex that central infrastructure.

That’s really gonna be the challenge that we’re all gonna face in managing increased density.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: I I want to dig in on that with you, we’ll get to to it in a little bit. But dig in on I this is the I like this this is fun but I did want to I did want to talk to you about the phases you made the comment that you’re changing the way that you’re looking at phases we talked about the build sizes increasing we talked about how the densities are evolving but as I think about the capacity delivery schedule for Equinix you know I build my model based on the number of cabinets and those are the phases that you have for your sites so how are you thinking about changing either the quantum of cabinets or the quantum of megawatts that you deliver in a single phase?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yeah. So I’ll start by saying we always think about power. We think less about it’s this number of cabinets because a given phase is gonna have so much power that it’s gonna be able to support. And how many cabs you can fit in that is a function of the density of those It’s just simple math. And so we’re going to increase the size of any phase that we do from a power standpoint.

And I would say even in, medium sized markets where demand may not be the same, we’re going be 10 or higher. And on the upper end, we’re in Ashburn, for example, which is one of our highest demand locations. We’re building at 50 in the retail space at a time now. There’s no it wouldn’t make any sense to do 10 in Ashburn.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: You know, one of the things that I think about it, and I’m gonna put this to you because obviously CapEx has come into the into focus. Right? Particularly after the Analyst Day. I want to take what you said and I’m gonna present it to you and I’d love your your thoughts. So the way I think about it is that we’ve seen enterprise deal sizes increase, and it feels like they’ve been accelerating they’ve been increasing at an accelerating rate in the last year.

So if you’re building just in time inventory, well, you’re gonna have to flex up in terms of your builds in the future in order to be able to handle continued increases in deal sizes. But then there’s a second, I’d call it a twin engine. There’s another dynamic which is that, look, we’re seeing the hyper scaler scaler start to scale inference. Right? And I think there’s an expectation that there will be a hybrid cloud model or hybrid model just like we saw with cloud, and you need to be positioned with capacity in order to service that demand when it comes, and those two things are driving your CapEx higher.

Do you think that is a correct framework for thinking about, you know, the Build Bolder initiative and the increase in CapEx that you’re forecasting?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Absolutely. I mean, for us, it’s about all of the above. We’re not counting and banking on any one trend to be the sole reason that drives our capacity needs. Obviously AI is going to play a factor. We think inferencing is probably likely to be our sweet spot.

But we also see a lot of digital transformation happening across the enterprise broadly. And that’s what’s been leading up to the demand inflection that we’re currently seeing for the larger footprint. I don’t think AI is that prevalent in terms of infrastructure deployment today widely across the enterprise. But it’s coming. Yes.

And obviously, we want to be prepared for it and we want to anticipate it. And so we’re going to lean into that. But that’s not the only use case or scenario that’s driving demand today, for sure.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. I do wanna I wanna transition a little bit, talk about X scale, some some of the hyper scale

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: trends. My

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: understanding is that you’re you oversee both the retail as well as X scale construction. Is that do I have that right?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Correct.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. What I’m curious about is are there any big differences that you’d call out in terms of the construction management process or the go to market in terms of development aside from larger higher density right Any differences that you’d call out in terms of the go to market for building that capacity?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: I think the biggest there’s two big differences. One is just the sheer size and scale of that project Mhmm. Typically. And the second revolves around whether there’s a customer in the equation at the time we’re building it or not.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: And when there is a customer, it’s a much more demanding program management challenge. And we’re think what you’re poking at, I can sort of read between the lines, it takes a different caliber of program management talent and capability to manage one of those projects versus a retail project, particularly with how we approached it in the past. However, those two lines are gonna merge because we’re gonna build much bigger retail buildings and phases. And so everything’s gonna be larger scale, which means we have to increase our program management capability. And we’re adding lots of talent, lots of people in our design and construction team to prepare and anticipate for that.

And we’re changing something we call gearing. And gearing for us is the ratio of program management people to the project. We used to run it fairly light, and we’re realizing that given today’s complexity, I think this will resonate with most of the people in the room that are building, It is much harder to build today than, say, five years ago, and much harder than ten years ago. Everything about today is harder. Getting equipment on time, failure rates, labor supply, productivity, permitting, regulation, design, everything about how we build today is harder than it used to be.

And so for that reason, as well as just we wanna, you know, be on top of the programs in a tighter fashion, we’re increasing everything about how we manage projects.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: You know where I wanted to go with this is I’m curious and I appreciate the answer in terms of hey on the retail side the sizes are increasing more akin to hyperscale but then we’re also seeing hyperscale. We weren’t talking about gigawatt deals you know, two years ago. Right? So the whole continuum has moved up. I’m curious as that dynamic plays out, do you think it’s increasingly appropriate to maybe separate out those two functions and have like a dedicated hyperscale build team versus having a retail team?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Short answer is it depends on what layer of the organization you’re talking about. And so what we do today and what we believe is the right answer, and it’s not necessarily the answer for the ages, we’ll keep evaluating, is that the programmed teams are separate and dedicated per project. And we have a group of projects in any given location that have this dedicated team that’s more capable as well as experienced with those types of projects on an ongoing basis because we don’t build once, we continue to in any given market. As it comes up the tower of the organization, we think having it unified from a supply chain, from a contractor standpoint, from a planning standpoint, from a tool standpoint, from a sort of leadership and design perspective, we think it all still makes sense to merge Okay. At the upper layers of the organization, that doesn’t mean you don’t need unique capability on the ground, which is really where we’re making the changes.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Perfect. Thank you for that. For XScale, we’ve seen you move bigger scale going to Atlanta it seems like there are other markets on the horizon. Know now that you’re building these large hyperscale campuses I’m curious how the engagement with the utility changes right? Because when you’re procuring 10 megawatts or 30 megawatts, it’s one conversation.

When you say 200, all of a sudden, it’s a completely different world. Right? So how has that go to market evolved?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yeah. You know, we used to go plan where we wanted to build a data center, secure that land, and then we’d make an application for that power. And when we were talking ten, fifteen megawatts, it was a question of time. And time was defined in a year or two. But you could feel confident you’d get that power.

Yeah. Those days are gone for two reasons. One, we’re no longer building in those increments. And two, the amount of power we need isn’t sitting around on the grid. And so we are planning, and I think most people in the room that are doing data center development ensuring you have clear line of sight to that power before you take down any land or plant any data center capacity.

And that might mean a longer cycle, a longer planning horizon with the utility. And it may mean a different level of infrastructure. And in the past, if you were taking down ten, fifteen megawatts, you literally you basically had maybe a step down transformer inside of your building, and you had medium voltage delivered to your front door. It was connected to a transformer that maybe you owned, maybe the utility owned, and it was fairly straightforward. Today, if we go ask a utility for 100, 200, 300, 400, you name the number, we’re having to, one, plan differently.

We’re having to put different infrastructure in. We’re building our own substations that we either own or we build and then turn over to the And for the most part, we’re connecting at the high transmission voltage level. So it’s a very different proposition. And even then, we may not get utility grid fast enough. And therefore, we’re looking at alternates such as on-site generation, either as a bridge or as the first phase and then wait for the utility for the second phase.

I think in today’s world you have to be super flexible, multi pronged with your energy approach, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Somebody asked me earlier in one of our private sessions, Do you feel like you have it under control and do

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: you feel

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: at ease with energy? And I was like, Are you kidding?

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Nah, yeah. I don’t

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: think anyone can do it. There’s not gonna be a period The same with supply chain, right? It’s gonna be hard work, grinding, managing. We’ve built a very large energy team within the company to do nothing but manage these various dimensions, variables, dynamics, changes? Is the I mean, the days of, I’m gonna order something for utility and I’ll wait two years and hopefully it arrives, forget it.

Yeah, that doesn’t work. We’re structuring a special deal with that utility, and we’re going to monitor every milestone along the way to ensure that in two, three years, whatever the time horizon is, it’s actually gonna arrive. If there are key milestones missed along the way, we’re gonna be engaging with the utility. So it’s gonna take a whole different level of power planning and engagement and discussion, and public utility regulation is changing around if you don’t use it, you’re gonna lose it. And we’re seeing that model emerge in a number of markets.

And so monitoring and keeping in close dialogue with the utility so you understand what power they’ve actually allocated to you. Because you have to think about power, I guess, in the simplest of terms in two sort of relevant variables. One the infrastructure that they brought to you has a capability to it, has a capacity to it. But there’s power that sits behind that that has to be managed by the utility. And if they’re not planning for the infrastructure or to deliver the amount of power that’s in that sort of connection, then you get out of balance And really we’ve literally seen that.

And so you have to be in constant dialogue with the utility. Hey, I’ve got a 20 megawatt connection. I’m using whatever, 12. Are you reserving the other eight for me, or here’s my projection of when I’m gonna ramp into that? So capacity planning for the utilities is no easy task these days.

For the longest time, a utility’s load looked like this. And then with electrification coming to fruition, now they’re seeing upticks that they have to get on top of from a planning and capacity standpoint. You know, I want to take

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: what you just said. Let’s take a step further. So as you think about the retail buildings that you’re building I appreciate that when you’re doing hundred two hundred three hundred megawatt campuses on the hyperscale side that that’s the conversation.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: I want to touch on that that point but go ahead

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: please So answer your one of the things that when we’re talking about hyperscale we hear mandatory minimum commits, clawbacks on power, cost in native construction where you’re so to what you just said, you’re putting the money up for either a transformer or maybe even some of the transmission upgrades. What I’m curious is at the retail level, are you being required to do that in order to get the 60 megawatts of power in Northern Virginia? Because if the answer is yes, then that introduces, obviously, a new set of questions, particularly if there are mandatory minimum commits involved.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: The short answer is yes, because of the increments you’re talking about. So if you’re building a 60 megawatt X scale or hyperscale facility or a 60 megawatt retail facility, the power dynamic to get power to that location is the same. The ramp up might be a little different, but otherwise the arrangement you make is similar. This is actually a good segue to the point I wanted to make, which is if you look at what we’re doing in Hampton, which I know you’re very familiar with, that is what we refer to as a hybrid location, which means we’ll have retail and ex scale in the same campus. We got four buildings.

We got four buildings to work with. The score of how those four buildings will be used is to be told yet. And we have complete flexibility. We may end up with 2X scale, two retail. We may end up with one retail, 3X scale, any center, any combination you can think of.

We’re maintaining complete flexibility with how we use that infrastructure.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: So surprise surprise, I was having trouble sleeping last night because I was excited about the conference. But one of the things I was thinking about is Hampton the Hampton site. And I was thinking, well, look, CapEx is obviously a focus for people. You have a JV partner that, you know, is funding, let’s say, 80% or 75 in the new JV, 25 for you. Is there a world in which it actually makes sense from being capital light to lease capacity from that’s built by XScale for use on the retail platform?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yes. And that would be There are various scenarios out there. I’ll paint the picture to the two most likely and easiest to wrap your head around. One is the entire property and the infrastructure and the buildings are owned and on the JV balance sheet, in which case Equinix would lease a building or buildings. The other is when we go master plan.

You’ll see more of these cases coming. Okay. Not to lead too much into it, but there’s when we master plan a large campus we may buy a large plot of land. We may plan the upfront utility in common way. And we may take that parcel and we may split it.

And some will be X scale on the JV books, and some will be on Equinix’s balance sheet. But master plan together, utility solution together, and again gives us utmost flexibility in terms of how we manage that and probably a little bit more capital efficient too.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: I mean that to me goes back to the core proposition or at least how I remember being presented to me of XScale which is that there is value in having the compute node sit on the same campus as the network node and the interplay between the two. It’s like this it’s the same idea just at a camp a large campus scale is kind of how I’m interpreting it with some added benefits of capital efficiency and you being able to have one go to market motion with the utility?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: The utility, the supply chain, capacity management, all of those benefits would be there. The ability to track more network providers to that campus. It’s got the full networking effect proposition the more we have multi tenant data centers as well as hyperscale deployments all in that same general it’s actually more operationally efficient too. One of the things we’re looking hard at now is, okay, in this new world where I’ve got a campus that supports two forty megawatts, What does it take to run that? What is the operating model?

How do we manage deliveries? How do we manage the infrastructure? How do we maintain it? For sure, I’m not going to quote numbers, but for sure, the number of people needed on a unit basis is dramatically lower in that environment versus I’ve got a standalone 20 megawatt data center and the number of people needed to run that, again, a unit basis, is much more efficient.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it. I wanted to ask you, we’ve talked about Hampton. Have you secured power for that site?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: We have. We have.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. And is that from Georgia Power?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: It’s a so the way there’s a co op down there called ENC, I think is the acronym. Okay. And it’s regional player that fronts Georgia Power. And so it’s a complex system down there, and people are gonna run into this in numerous locations the more you get out into the outskirts. But basically, they’re the local distribution, and what sits behind them are the transmission line and the generation.

And there are three parties involved. You interface with the ultimate provider, which is EMC in this case, and they go and secure the transmission and the generation to deliver you that local power. So you strike a deal, but you have to be aware of what’s happening behind that front line.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: That’s what I was gonna ask is that my understanding is the cooperatives, they don’t procure generate they don’t build generation.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: They build it.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: They rely on somebody else. Then the next question becomes do they have the power from Georgia Power? Yes. Okay. Yes.

All right. That’s that’s great to hear. Wouldn’t be

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: that deal if we didn’t have confidence that the full system was Awesome.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Kudos. Okay. Cool. Now I wanna transition in the time we have left. I wanna talk about I

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: think you you misled the crowd. Time for Q and A.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: I’ll ask one and then we’ll do Q and A. Alright. We’ll make it fun. So here’s my question for you. Rack densities continue to increase.

One of the questions I get from investors is about the installed base of data centers. This came up in the enterprise panel earlier where we were talking about the potential need to retrofit. How do you think about that? And then I know that you’ve undertaken a project. I wanna say this was two years ago to start, getting your to get your existing sites ready to support liquid cooling.

I also wanna talk about that and how that has gone. So how do you think about retrofit? And then what are you doing in terms of supporting liquid cooling capabilities within the existing fleet of data centers?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: Yeah. So, again, remember what liquid cooling is. It is taking the chilled water from a central plant and distributing it to it in a different way than just taking it to an area.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Yep. There.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: And so the retrofit we’re doing to enable liquid cooling is tapping into that chilled water system to extend it to offer liquid cooling. So literally, you have to just tap into that pipe. And as long as you have sufficient central plant capacity, then you can leverage that. We can upgrade the central plant as necessary. But keep in mind, in the data center environment, broadly speaking, there is a lot of headroom in terms of what people buy and what they use.

And so we’re gonna continue to push the boundary on what you can utilize. And in all the locations that we’ve described, we have spare chilled water central plant capacity And to tap if need be, we’ll add more chillers, we’ll add more what have you, in cases where that’s possible. But the retrofit isn’t as dramatic as it sounds because we’re just tapping into existing infrastructure. And what we’re really trying to do, and just to put it in context, is we’re trying to monetize the pockets of space that aren’t used. Most of these centers are fairly well occupied in the 80 plus percent range, right?

So there’s some pockets that

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: we’re Is seeing opportunities that on a cabinet basis, on a square footage basis, or on a power basis?

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: That is on a space basis.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: On a square footage basis. Okay.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: The power is actually lower than that because there’s lots of headroom. People, you know, typical system is designed and engineered, You know, somebody’s gonna, you know, plan for let’s just say, I’m gonna take down a 100 KW. I’m gonna leave twenty, thirty, 40 KW of that for engineering headroom because engineers are conservative as well as growth. And so we monitor that trajectory and that load. And, you know, it’s it’s actually about half of what is is consumed.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. Well, I set out open up for questions. So any questions from the audience? Yes, please. Thanks

Unidentified speaker: for the comments, Rolf. Great stuff. Curious, are you starting to see, we’re starting to see some of the utilities Dominion, Encore start these proceedings around large electrical loads, how they can impact the grid based on SAGs, based on the oscillation that we’re seeing with these GPUs. And nothing’s come out yet, but just wondering how you guys are thinking about that and how you guys are thinking about kind of incorporating that in terms of your offering and how to protect yourself and all that stuff.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: And just to be clear, we’re talking about load spiking with GPUs. That’s correct. Okay. That was gonna be my next

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: question, so thank you. I think early days to understand how that’s gonna work en masse and whether if you had a center that’s completely filled with that versus it’s blend of that plus other things and the load is somewhat stable and static. I think we’re actually more worried about it down at the lower the next level down at the UPS level because that’s what’s gonna tie directly to that load. And so I think a lot of work is being done to evaluate how that’s gonna play out, and I’d say it’s early days. I actually thought you were getting at a different dynamic, which is, historically what’s happened is if you were gonna take down a bunch of capacity off of the grid and incremental infrastructure was needed, the capital required to do that was spread across the rate base.

Well, I think what we’re seeing more and more of is, well, that’s not gonna work. That’s not gonna fly. The rate base isn’t gonna, you know, just stand by for that. The PUC is not gonna stand by for that. And so players in the data center space are gonna have to step up to underwriting that infrastructure in various different ways, and that’s playing out real time as well.

So I think there’s a lot of dynamic dimension to what’s happening in the energy space right now, including how to manage the future world of spikes and variables and the like.

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: Alright. Well, with that, I’m looking at the back of the room. Looks like we’re out of time. It was a pleasure. Did you

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: leave time for Q?

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: I did.

Ralph Abdo, EVP of Global Operations, Equinix: I did. Finally, I did. Thank

Michael Eisen, Analyst, TD Cowen: you very much, Ralph, for joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much, for being here. That that was awesome, man. Thank you.

Thank you, sweetheart.

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