Equinix’s Leanne Starace on the role of AI in global infrastructure development

As data centres enter further into the public consciousness, businesses within the industry play a significant role in the daily lives of people worldwide. These facilities are the digital backbone for innovation, where service providers and enterprise businesses can bring innovation to life on a global scale.

For Equinix, everything with a digital interface requires a secure place for data to reside, but also the ability for that data to be accessible and interconnected to unlock its value. As one of the largest interconnected data centre companies in the world, Equinix is home to the foundational infrastructure required for opportune digital service performance.

The company’s senior vice president of global technical sales and solutions, Leanne Starace, shares how Equinix is involved in all these daily interactions.

“The massive impact of the evolution of technology – the ease of use – by putting something like a cell phone in the palm of our hand, all of the services that power that experience have moved into real time and it’s a complicated process behind the scenes to make all of that possible,” she explains.

“We have more than 270 data centres in 75 metros across six continents and work with the largest and most innovative companies, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA, to provide these services.”

Confronting AI data centre demand

Equinix is currently witnessing plenty of change across the industry, specifically to do with the growing demand for AI data centres. With AI evolving and becoming newly accessible, Leanne explains how Equinix is now experiencing very strong demand from its customer and prospect base for AI.

“Just to give you an idea of the size of the demand: in the first quarter of this year, half of our top 25 deals were AI related,” she says. “We’ve also continued to work closely and expand our partnership with some of the biggest names in AI like Nvidia.

“There’s also a tremendous growth in cloud, enterprise IT and digital transformation, as data centre demand grows rapidly worldwide.”

To accommodate such rapid growth, Equinix is building new data centres and expanding its existing data centre footprint to meet global demands. Currently, Leanne explains the company has 59 major projects of expansion or new data centre build projects underway in 25 countries.

“We’re also seeing companies focusing on targeted AI use cases. We’ve heard a lot about large-scale training deployments – maybe as the first phase of AI – but the consumption of those training models is happening in more of a localised way,” she says. “This is why we’re focused on these AI use cases to leverage the infrastructure that we have around the world and our low latency networks for efficient AI inference.”

Creating value with new infrastructure

With companies across critical industries engaging with AI even further, including finance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, Equinix sees itself at the heart of all that value and expansion.

Leanne explains how this is impacting the data centre industry: “Demand has exponentially increased, and global data centre vacancies right now are historically low.

“Also driving this demand are other factors, like reshoring of advanced manufacturing, electrification and the way we deliver these infrastructure elements, including power and the grid networks required around the world in order to make compute possible.”

For data centres to be able to run higher density compute, they need to be different from legacy data centres. More traditional data centres struggle to handle more demanding and more powerful AI workloads, meaning that building equipment needs to me more advanced structurally.

“The equipment stack is heavier and larger than what traditional data centres have been built for, and it requires different cooling technologies to accommodate high-performance workloads,” Leanne explains. “High performance compute can produce a lot of heat as a byproduct of performance.

“Cooling is one of the biggest changes that we’re seeing. New powerful, high-density hardware used for AI model training and inference can’t be efficiently cooled by traditional techniques like cold air only.

“We’ve invested in liquid cooling infrastructure to manage these high-density AI deployments, which is more effective at keeping the GPUs not only cool but operating as efficiently as they can. We have advanced liquid cooling support at more than 100 of our 270 data centres around the world.”

Advancing interconnectivity

Strong fibre connectivity is also essential, as it can support AI-ready data centre growth. Around the world, fibre provides ultra-low latency and scalability that AI workloads require to function better.

When it comes to building AI-ready data centres, high performance compute and connectivity are critical.

“The industries we’ve talked about rely on compute service and the exchange of data,” Leanne explains. “It can feel like the internet is intangible, but there is a physical world that is the foundation of all our digital experiences. It’s a world of fibre optic cables, routers, switches, firewalls, satellites, subsea cables, and, of course, data centres, which house much of the world’s technology infrastructure.”

Equinix prides itself on making it possible for data to move from one place to another rapidly to make end solutions – like the internet – possible.

“It’s the connecting of all our data centres that showcases our commitment to building a robust, interconnected, global digital network,” Leanne adds. “We leverage fibre optic technology and our partners and carriers worldwide to meet increasing demand for high-speed connectivity and data exchange.

“The networking component – this interconnectivity – is the foundation for all these technologies to operate.”

Equinix has a strong commitment to large and strategic data centre deployments, which it refers to as its xScale data centres. These provide access to a comprehensive suite of interconnection and edge services that tie into a hyperscale company’s existing access points at Equinix and advance interconnectivity across multiple metros.

Leanne explains: ““Our xScale data centres enable hyperscale companies to add these core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix and enable their growth on a single platform that can immediately offer direct connectivity of their services to the ecosystem of customers for consumption that we have around the world.

“They serve unique core workload deployments for our hyperscale partners, including the world’s largest cloud service providers who are key players in the AI ecosystem.”

The strategy is very deliberate, she says, as Equinix pursues strategic large-scale AI training deployments with the top hyperscalers and other key players in the AI ecosystem.

“Through our existing hyperscale joint venture portfolio in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas, we’re expected to invest over US$8 billion,” Leanne says. “Once fully built out, these joint ventures are expected to include more than 35 facilities, which will have an IT capacity of greater than 725MW total.”

Prioritising flexibility

As AI continues to transform the data centre landscape, customers of all business sizes are all actively participating to capture the latest technology trends. This is why, Leanne says, flexibility is so vital when it comes to interconnectivity.

“I think flexibility with technology is a strategic advantage,” she shares. “It lets Equinix customers move fast and allows them to innovate with technology partners in these data exchange environments and operate more freely with greater optionality of technology choices.

Equinix offers access to its entire global portfolio of partners so customers that wish to bring their digital infrastructure and connectivity to Equinix are given flexibility.

Leanne adds: “They can also have a consistent experience globally, which allows them to have greater flexibility in the way that they deploy. All while staying resilient in a highly evolving AI digital economy.”

Looking ahead, it’s clear how essential data centres are to powering the next generation of technology transformation and AI innovation.

“AI is really a game changer for driving value and efficiency in our economy and is developing at such a rapid pace,” Leanne says. “That’s why events like Datacloud Global Congress are so important to showcase what’s happening in technology innovation, so companies can be informed and understand how they need to build out their infrastructure, connectivity and technology partnerships to help underwrite them for future growth and success.

“It’s a really exciting time to be part of this industry and share all of the benefits of this rapidly evolving technology landscape.”

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