Seattle: A City at the Crossroads of the Americas and Asia-Pacific

An international hub for building and interconnecting digital infrastructure

Jeff Bender
Seattle: A City at the Crossroads of the Americas and Asia-Pacific

Why go to Seattle to build and grow your digital business?

As a graduate of the University of Southern California, I am a big Pete Carroll fan and have adopted the Seahawks as one of my favorite NFL teams. And as part of the tech industry for over 20-years, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Seattle and fell in love with the city. Seattle has many similarities to where I grew up in San Francisco, with its feel and beauty…and great seafood! This is what Seattle means to me, but more importantly, here is what Seattle can mean to your business.

Situated on an isthmus between the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, just 100 miles (160 km) south of the Canadian border, Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest with approximately 4 million residents. Its economic strength ꟷ ranked 2nd among the 30 biggest metros in the U.S. by GDP ꟷ is bolstered by Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Expedia, Alaska Air Group and Weyerhaeuser. Doing business in Seattle, puts you in very good company.

Tech-Friendly

Seattle’s metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is ranked in the top 10 for global cities with technology venture capital investments. It is also the #1 metro area for STEM professionals in the nation, with 80% of STEM students staying in Washington upon graduation. Seattle is the #2 best metro to attract and grow tech talent in the nation, ranked by CBRE.[i] Thirteen percent of Washington’s workforce is in tech, giving it an establish talent pool for companies to draw from in industries such as content and digital media, financial services, retail, software/application development and transportation. In addition, the state of Washington currently has 5,044 startups, with 2,286 of those within the city of Seattle, and companies investing heavily in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Seattle is a tech-rich environment ripe with possibilities.

International Launching Point

If your business needs an international launching point, Seattle is an interconnection hub within North American and Asia-Pacific (AP) digital corridors. From Seattle, you can take high-speed, low-latency terrestrial fiber routes to Canada and the rest of the U.S., and subsea cable routes to China, New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii via the Hawaiki Cable, and the Japanese market via the FASTER subsea cable system. New providers are bringing increased connectivity to the state of Washington, such as China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel.

Sustainability

Over 83,000 Washingtonians are employed in the clean-energy industry, with the majority working on energy efficiency and 55% of Washington’s clean energy jobs are based within the Seattle MSA. In addition, SB 5116 100% clean-electricity legislation will phase out coal use in Washington state by 2025 and utility company, Seattle City Light, offers customers several options to increase the supply of renewable energy.

Why Choose Seattle Data Centers?

Our interconnection-rich Seattle IBX data centers provide low-latency access to Asia-Pacific via transoceanic cable landings. Customers can directly connect to 175+ companies and reduce transit expenses with direct access to the Seattle Internet Exchange.

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Why grow your digital business on Platform Equinix?

All the right places

Equinix Seattle has a large scalable footprint in the metro area with 129,000 sq. ft of colocation space across Equinix’s three IBX facilities. The Seattle IBX data centers are perfectly positioned between the terrestrial routes that connect East and West Canada, the U.S. and LATAM, and the subsea cable routes that connect North America, AP and EMEA.

With our acquisition of 13 Bell Canada data centers, in addition to our Toronto facilities, we can interconnect Canada from coast-to-coast. This proximity to Canada gives Seattle enterprises high-speed connections to the Canadian market while maintaining  infrastructure in the U.S. for regulatory, technological and operational simplicity. And our Seattle IBX facilities are the closest interconnection hubs between the U.S. and AP markets via high-speed, low-latency subsea cable routes to Japan via the FASTER subsea cable landing station in SE3 and indirect access to other subsea cable routes, such as the Hawaiki Cable that connects North America to AP markets.

In addition, Equinix is committed to achieving 100% clean and renewable energy usage and investing in energy efficiency technologies to make significant carbon reductions across its global data center portfolio. We have currently achieved over 90% renewable energy globally.

Seattle IBX facilities can act as North American disaster recovery sites as they are away from earthquake zones.

All the right partners

As the #1 metro retail colocation provider in Seattle, Equinix is where digital leaders in multiple industries around the world expand their businesses. More than 250 customers, including internet, financial services, manufacturers, healthcare and biotech companies are inside Equinix Seattle. And with vibrant digital and business ecosystems, Equinix Seattle is where companies can meet and interconnect with partners that matter most to their business.

Expanding ecosystems in Seattle Equinix IBX data centers include:

  • 75+ cloud and IT service providers
  • 69+ network services
  • 25+ financial services firms
  • 35+ content and digital media companies
  • 85+ G2000 companies
  • 10 of the Fortune 500 companies

Equinix Seattle is a center of interconnection, industry and innovation, and a global gateway to secure, high-capacity network routes. Direct and secure private connectivity is available to hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) via Equinix Fabric™ such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud ꟷ just to name a few. Enterprises and service providers can also get direct and secure access to the Seattle Internet Exchange via Equinix Internet Exchange. You can leverage digital ecosystems within the Seattle metro to directly integrate your business locally while accelerating performance globally.

All the right possibilities

On Platform Equinix, you can quickly and simply deploy agile infrastructure for network optimization, hybrid multicloud, distributed data and security, and application exchange to accelerate your business’ digital transformation. Build next-generation SD-WAN architectures for more flexible, scalable, secure and reliable connectivity to users, network service providers (NSPs), CSPs and IT providers at the edge. Equinix’s global footprint provides multiple points-of-presence (PoP) proximate to employees, partners and customers, where you can harness high-speed, low-latency connections for the best possible user experience.

At Equinix Seattle, you can quickly and easily deploy and connect digital infrastructure from the core to the edge, leveraging a broad array of IT services such as:

  • Equinix Fabric – Connect digital infrastructure and services on demand at software speed via secure, software-defined interconnection across multiple metro locations.
  • Network Edge – Modernize your network by deploying virtual network services from leading vendors at the edge in minutes, with no additional hardware requirements.
  • Equinix Metal™ – Deploy interconnected, automated bare metal as a service and leverage physical infrastructure on-demand.
  • Equinix Precision Time™ – Get global, secure Precise Time-as-a-Service synchronization for distributed enterprise systems.

At Equinix Seattle, digital leaders harness our trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success… and you can too.

Learn more about the Equinix Seattle metro IBX data centers.

 

[i] CBRE, “2020 Scoring Tech Talent in North America.”

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