DATA centre firm Equinix inked a joint venture (JV) agreement with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) to raise capital of more than US$15 billion and grow its data centre portfolio.
The JV, in the form of a limited liability partnership, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024, subject to regulatory approvals.
Under its terms of agreement, GIC and CPP Investments will each hold a 37.5 per cent equity interest in the JV while Equinix will hold a 25 per cent stake, said the US-based company on Wednesday (Oct 2) in a press statement.
The JV aims to accelerate Equinix’s portfolio of xScale data centres, or Equinix hyperscale data centres, and enable hyperscale companies to add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres. At full build-out, it will nearly treble the Equinix xScale programme’s investment capital.
Equinix expects to use capital the JV raises to buy land and to build new facilities on multiple greater-than-100-megawatt (MW) campuses in the US. Eventually, this will add more than 1.5 gigawatts of new capacity for hyperscale customers, it added.
All JV parties have made equity commitments and the JV also expects to take on debt to raise the total pool of investable capital to more than US$15 billion over time.
“xScale data centres serve the unique core workload deployment needs of the world’s largest cloud service providers, including hyperscalers, which are key players in the artificial intelligence ecosystem. These companies can add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix IBX data centres, enabling their growth on a single platform that can immediately span 72 global metros and offer direct interconnection to an ecosystem of more than 10,000 customers,” noted Equinix.
Currently, Equinix’s existing hyperscale JV portfolio in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas has a committed investment of more than US$8 billion, and is expected to bring about over 725 MW of power capacity across more than 35 facilities at full build-out.
This marks Equinix’s first JV with CPP Investments, which manages assets of the Canada Pension Plan for more than 22 million contributors and beneficiaries. The data centre company has a longstanding relationship with GIC, having previously partnered it on xScale projects in Asia, the Americas and Europe.
