Equinix expands Silicon Valley campus

Equinix has announced the ability to serve more enterprise partners and customers with its newest International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center in Silicon Valley, located at its Great Oaks campus in San Jose. The $142M facility, named SV11, is expected to open June 30, 2021, and will support the increasing demand from organizations for premium data center services to accelerate business performance and drive their digital transformation agendas. 

SV11 is targeting LEED Silver certification with an ultra-low design average annual Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.17. SV11 customers can benefit from reductions of their CO2 footprint through Equinix’s renewable energy procurement strategy and the use of energy-efficient systems throughout the facility. Additionally, with expansion of the current Bloom Energy fuel cells, the campus is planned for 20 megawatt (MW) of capacity, and will be the first time Equinix will use the system as primary generation with utility electrical grid and generators as backup sources. This continues Equinix’s exploration of alternative fuel sources for both energy reliability and sustainability.

“Digital transformation continues to accelerate at an unprecedented rate,” said Jon Lin, President, Americas, Equinix. “In fact, 47% of respondents in a recent Equinix survey of enterprise IT decision-makers said they have accelerated their digital transformation plans. SV11 is another example of our commitment to provide our customers with the right places, partners and possibilities for their digital transformations now and in the future.”

Equinix data centers in the Silicon Valley region are the business hub for more than 700 customers, and Silicon Valley represents the third-largest colocation metro in the Americas region and ninth globally. With the addition of SV11, Equinix has invested more than $1.25B in the local economy including its Great Oaks campus and has additional land in the area for future expansion, as demand arises. These facilities house rich ecosystems that allow network and content providers, cloud and IT service providers, and enterprise customers to quickly and efficiently exchange critical business data with their customers and partners through interconnection. 

According to Stefanie Williams, Senior Research Analyst for 451, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, “The multi-tenant data center industry in Northern California has continued to see steady demand over the past several years, and this growth will be ongoing for the near future. IT firms of all kinds – from cloud and software to gaming – are driving the demand for connectivity and the ability to be in close proximity to clouds, partners and users. Equinix is expanding its presence in Silicon Valley to meet these potential customer requirements for digital infrastructure, while focusing on designing and operating a facility in line with its internal sustainability objectives.”

Interconnection—the ability to privately exchange information between businesses versus over the public internet—is paramount for companies in the Silicon Valley campus. In fact, according to the Global Interconnection Index, a market study published recently by Equinix, the United States is the largest and most advanced region for interconnection bandwidth growth, contributing 41% of all the interconnection bandwidth of the world, and is predicted to grow with a 43% CAGR between 2019 and 2023. Silicon Valley represents one of the top four data center markets in terms of annualized revenue in the U.S. behind North Virginia and the New York/New Jersey markets, and Dallas.[1]   The metro is predicted grow fastest in the US in terms of interconnection growth, with a 46% CAGR in the same period.

SV11 is a two-story, state-of-the-art data center designed to deliver both small- and large-capacity deployments. The innovative, modular construction incorporates Equinix's Flexible Data Center (FDC) principles, which leverage common design elements for space, power and cooling to reduce capital costs while ensuring long-term maintenance predictability. The initial phase of SV11 will add more than 61,000 square feet (5,667+ square meters) of colocation space—and provides campus cross-connectivity into SV1, SV5 and SV10, making it an ideal home for customers looking to interconnect to key network and cloud service providers. Initially, it will include space for 1,450 cabinets, with space for additional cabinets in future phases. At full build, the facility will provide capacity for 2,950 cabinets.  

Equinix is a leader in data center sustainability and in greening the supply chains of its customers. Equinix’s long-term goal of using 100% clean and renewable energy for its global platform has resulted in significant increases in renewable energy coverage globally including 100% renewable throughout the United States. Equinix has continued to make advancements in the way it designs, builds and operates its data centers with high energy-efficiency standards. 

With the opening of SV11, Equinix will now operate fourteen Silicon Valley data center sites. The addition of SV11—located adjacent to SV1, SV5 and SV10—provides additional capacity to meet the growing need for interconnection, multicloud deployments and connectivity to a broad range of network, cloud and content services offered on platform Equinix. 

By utilizing Equinix Metro Connect®, customers in SV11 can also easily and directly connect with customers in other Equinix IBX data centers in Silicon Valley. Additionally, Equinix Silicon Valley data centers provide low-latency routes to key metro areas such as Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles.

Equinix offers platform services, helping to enable the consumption of digital infrastructure and accelerating digital transformation for new and existing customers. Equinix Silicon Valley data centers offers customers access to:

o   Equinix Fabric™, an on-demand platform that enables Equinix customers to discover and dynamically connect to any other customer across any Equinix location globally. Equinix Fabric offers access to more than 2,500 of the world’s largest enterprises, cloud service providers (including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud) and SaaS providers (including Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow, among others).

o   Equinix Metal™, a fully automated and interconnected bare metal service. With new service, companies have the option to deploy the physical infrastructure of their choice at software speed across Equinix's trusted platform. Together with other digital infrastructure building blocks in the Equinix portfolio, customers now have a broad range of physical and virtual deployment alternatives to place infrastructure wherever they need it and connect to everything they need to succeed.