Looking Back: How Trust is the Key Platform to Build Our Future

We have come to the end of another year of this global pandemic, which has been a weight on all our shoulders. For many of us, it has created unique situations that we’ve had to deal with for the first time in our lives. At the same time, through all these challenges, we have continued to keep our local economies and institutions running.

As we look back over 2021, I must admit that there have been moments that I have felt overwhelmed. The lack of in-person interaction, due to pandemic restrictions, made it challenging to develop meaningful connections; not only for myself, but many of my customer and partner peers have expressed similar experiences.

What really stood out through my various conversations is that the organizations with a strong cultural infrastructure are the most resilient. Enterprises, like ours, that have a foundation built on core values that sustain trust, innovation and collaboration continue to move forward and grow. We live our culture and values, which we call the “Magic of Equinix.” It describes the collective personality of our company—collaborating with multiple teams to land customers in multiple locations and putting the customer at the center of everything we do. This helps us deliver on our purpose to be the platform where the world comes together, enabling the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet.

This year, our purpose showed up in numerous ways including logging over 3,000 volunteer hours as part of our IMPACT program, which raised nearly $50,000 for charitable causes. We focused on expanding our global reach to align with our customers’ digital transformation strategies, as they built and interconnected foundational digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix® across EMEA and beyond. We also advanced our leadership in sustainability as the leading data center company to announce a global commitment to become climate neutral by 2030 through science-based targets.

Global reach across EMEA is advancing digital transformation

We are driven by our customers and to that end, we continue to expand our global reach to where they need us, meeting their digital infrastructure demands by entering new global markets to accelerate digitalization and interconnect enterprises and institutions at software speed.

As the Equinix platform provides lifeblood for the digital economy, we’re committed to delivering the fundamental infrastructure and private interconnection solutions through which our EMEA customers and partners can innovate and succeed. To this end, we’ve expanded our Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in Bordeaux, Geneva, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Munich and Paris, with seven more expansion sites to open in the first half of 2022. We ended the year with the long-awaited announcement that we are now adding the African continent—one I’m very excited about—with our recently announced intent to acquire MainOne, closing in Q1 2022.

Subsea cabling has gathered momentum across the region, which has created greater demand for cable landing systems (CLS) in multiple Equinix EMEA metros, with new installations such as the EllaLink and Oman Australia Cable (OAC) landing systems. Equinix subsea cable hubs in Barcelona, Bordeaux, Genoa, Lisbon, Muscat, and more have shown great success, further extending our reach and acting as global gateways that provide access to new markets throughout EMEA, Asia-Pacific and the Americas.

Sustainability is creating a new world of possibilities

As part of our purpose to be the digital infrastructure platform where the world comes together, we have a responsibility to do this in the most sustainable way within our operations, value chain and the broader industry. In March 2021, we coauthored and signed the European Union Climate Neutral Data Centre Operator Pact and Self-Regulatory Initiative for climate neutrality by 2030 along with 31 other data center operators and 20 trade associations.

This last June, we made a commitment to reach global climate neutrality by 2030 and achieve science-based targets that align with the goals of the Paris Agreement—“limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.”[i] Based on those targets, we are focused on reducing our company’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to prevent the worst effects of climate change by decreasing our carbon footprint, improving our power usage effectiveness (PUE), and committing to use 100% clean and renewable energy across our global portfolio. And recently, we announced that Equinix will join a consortium of seven organizations chosen by the European Commission to develop a next-generation fuel cell platform to ensure a greener future for data centers across the world.

We’ve been developing our data center information management (DCIM) system—IBX SmartView™— and other adaptive control systems to leverage artificial intelligence/machine learning for better IT system space and power usage management. And as part of our sustainability leadership, we’ve issued USD 7 billion+ in green bonds in the U.S. and Europe to support multiple areas of innovation in green buildings, renewable energy, energy and water efficiency, waste reduction and clean transportation.

I take great pride in the trust our EMEA customers have placed in our global platform. Together, we have developed resilient and sustainable digital infrastructure solutions that contribute great value to the global digital economy and bring outstanding innovation to current and future business leaders. And as we look out over a dynamically changing digital landscape, we look forward to embracing the new innovations that we see coming our way.

Learn more about the future of digital leadership on Platform Equinix.

[i] The European Pact for Sustainable Industry 2030