GIC signs joint venture deals with US data firm Equinix

Bengaluru

US-based data centre firm Equinix on Monday said it had signed agreements for additional joint ventures with Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC to add US$3.9 billion to expand a data centre programme.

The agreements for additional joint ventures in the form of limited liability partnerships with GIC, when closed, will bring the xScale data centre portfolio to more than US$6.9 billion across 32 facilities globally, Equinix said in a statement.

It is expected that the xScale portfolio of 32 facilities will provide more than 600 MW of power capacity when fully built out.

The joint venture projects are expected to close during the course of 2021. GIC will own an 80 per cent equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20 per cent equity interest, the statement added.

CEO of Equinix Charles Meyers said Equinix has worked for years with the world's largest cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

"With our xScale programme, these hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers," he said.

"The joint venture arrangement of xScale enables these large deployments to be structured in an off-balance sheet model that aims to preserve capital for investment in our traditional retail data centre and digital infrastructure business, and maintain our strategic and financial flexibility."

Last April, Equinix signed a joint venture worth more than US$1 billion with GIC to build three data centres in Japan for the cloud computing market. REUTERS