Prime Minister welcomes £295m investment into UK by Equinix

London, November 19 2018 – Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data centre company, today announced a new International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) site at its London Slough campus. UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, has welcomed the £90m project which contributes to a total new investment in the UK’s digital infrastructure of £295m.

The new flagship data centre, named LD7, is part of a fleet of new and expanded facilities on Equinix’s London Slough campus, and is due to open in early 2019. This new infrastructure will bring the company’s UK portfolio to 12 IBXs and supports increasing demand for capacity to handle growing volumes of data, including increasing traffic coming out of the City of London.

“Equinix’s investment reflects the growing demand for digital financial services in the City of London, and is a vote of confidence in its future as the world’s premier financial hub. This is exactly where we want to be heading”, said Mrs May.

Including current expansion projects, Equinix will have invested over £940 million to build and expand its presence in the London metro area. The campus processes a quarter of all of Europe’s equity trading, and connects the City of London with the rest of the world.

Equinix’s data centres, referred to as IBXs to reflect the rapid exchange of data between businesses globally, allow more than 1,000 firms in London, including capital market firms, insurers and e-payments companies, to process transactions securely. Companies such as Nasdaq rely upon Equinix sites for proximity to customers and partners in the City, which require high performance and rapid connectivity.

Businesses and cloud service providers depend on Equinix and its 200 global data centres to facilitate private data exchange between them, and away from the public internet – a process known as interconnection. This form of data exchange will soon be 10 times as big as the internet, and is growing twice as fast. Businesses hoping to survive in this digital era must be interdependent and cloud-enabled, operating at the digital edge, where commerce, population centres and digital ecosystems meet. This enables companies to achieve fast and secure connectivity between their dispersed employees, partners and users worldwide, gaining a competitive advantage.  

Equinix recently released the second volume of its new annual report, the Global Interconnection Index (GXI), mapping the growth of global data. The GXI shows that regardless of the UK’s departure from the EU, London is projected to be the largest market in Europe with regards to data, even if Frankfurt is the fastest growing market in the world.

Highlights/ Key Facts

• Equinix has over 200 sites in 52 markets across the world, enabling companies to conduct business internationally and compete in the global digital economy.
• The new £90m ($120m) data centre forms part of a total £295m ($387m) investment in the UK’s digital economy from Equinix throughout 2018/19. This includes £82m ($108m) in expansion to Equinix’s LD10 data centre, £94m ($120m) in expansion at its LD9 data centre and £29m ($39m) expansion of its LD4 data centre. The investment in expansions at LD9 and LD10 include the development of dedicated space for hyperscale infrastructure to meet demand from cloud service provider customers.
• With over 90 network service providers and access to a range of transatlantic cables, the London Slough campus is one of the busiest network nodes in the UK, and offers latency in the region of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt, making it an ideal high-performance hub for electronic trading, as well as cloud and content service provision.
• The new LD7 data centre will enable customers to interconnect securely with 1,000+ businesses in London including leading capital markets participants, insurers and electronic payments firms, as well as 200+ network service providers and 275+ cloud and IT service providers. LD7 will add 1,750 cabinets in its initial phase and expand to 2,650 cabinets at full build.
• Energy efficiency will be achieved at the site with the aid of an innovative Chilled Water System in combination with an Adiabatic heat rejection system. This will contribute to LD7 having lower energy consumption and a smaller carbon footprint than other facilities of its kind. As a result, the LD7 data centre will be built to LEED gold certified standards.
• LD7 will also provide direct, secure and dynamic software-defined interconnection through the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ Fabric to over 1,300 businesses including the largest CSPs. Customers can take advantage of scalability, agility and connectivity over a self-service portal or API and, through a single port, can discover and reach anyone at Equinix on demand, locally or across metros.
• Earlier this year the company also announced that it would expand its LD4 data centre due to continued growth of the world’s largest multi-asset class electronic trading ecosystem, which consists of a robust collection of interconnected execution venues, trading platforms, market data vendors, service providers, buy-side firms, and sell-side firms.

Quotes

Russell Poole, Managing Director UK, Equinix

• “London is one of the most important connection points in the world and this is expected to continue post-Brexit as the city continues to play a crucial role in powering the global digital economy. Our decision to invest again in the UK’s digital infrastructure reflects our confidence that London will remain a leader in the global digital economy, regardless of the outcome of the negotiations over the UK’s departure from the European Union. LD7 will be one of the most technologically advanced colocation data centres in the world and will be a major addition to our thriving London Slough campus. This latest data centre will also act as a sustainability benchmark for future data centres – something we are very passionate about.”

Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

• “Equinix’s investment reflects the growing demand for digital financial services in the City of London, and is a vote of confidence in its future as the world’s premier financial hub. This is exactly where we want to be heading.”

About Equinix
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects the world’s leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the most interconnected data centres. In 52 markets worldwide, Equinix is where companies come together to realize new opportunities and accelerate their business, IT and cloud strategies. http://www.equinix.com/ 

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to the risks described from time to time in Equinix’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see Equinix’s recent quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release. 

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