We’re witnessing a transformative period in the technology industry. Enterprises around the world are not just collecting data, but also harnessing it to gain unprecedented insights. With those insights, they’re solving problems, answering questions and driving real business value. Google has emerged as a significant contributor in this transformation, helping customers with AI-driven industry solutions delivered through Google Cloud.
I lead the Google business for Equinix, and couldn’t be more excited about the synergies between our two companies. We’re not just leveraging each other’s technology; we’re working together to make the cloud journey quicker, simpler and more effective at scale for our joint customers. Our companies also share common goals around driving healthy cultures that foster individualism and diversity, operating in a sustainable manner and building solutions with the specific needs of customers in mind. I am incredibly proud to be part of Equinix and to work alongside Google.
We’re leveraging Google AI capabilities to deliver better results for our company and ultimately our customers
Generative AI is a real game-changer in the industry today, and it’s one of the major factors that’s driving so many businesses to migrate to the cloud. By pairing AI and analytics tools from Google Cloud with the infrastructure solutions and ecosystem partnerships of Equinix, we are using GenAI to unlock more value from more data than ever before. We’ve begun to use AI technologies from Google Cloud within our internal IT operations to transform our own business and take those learnings to help our customers become more competitive.
We’re excited about the possibilities of leveraging our own capabilities as a leading provider of on-ramps to Google Cloud alongside Google AI and machine learning solutions, both in terms of immediate opportunities and long-term goals. As the world’s digital infrastructure company™, we can help our customers properly navigate their AI journeys with multicloud connectivity and cloud-adjacent environments to support their workloads on a global scale. Our strategy is built around a programmatic approach to leveraging AI/ML across our business operations. This means soliciting input and priorities from leadership teams and accelerating time to delivery for our models. Given the opportunity to improve outcomes so quickly, we now measure the ROI of our models based on time to market.
With the actionable insights we draw from Google AI tools, we’re able to deliver unparalleled capabilities and experiences for our internal customers, giving them the competitive advantage that they need to drive more successful outcomes. Thanks to our collaboration with Google Cloud, we’ve begun to infuse AI/ML into multiple aspects of our business in order to make us more innovative, agile and strategically positioned.
Our AI use cases are showing great results today
For us, AI is not just a new technology; it’s a strategic mindset. One reason we chose to use AI technologies from Google Cloud is that it allows us to standardize our AI/ML work. This means we can enable AI reuse and synergy across the entire business, driving even faster time to market and greater business agility. We’re starting small and ramping up quickly across a variety of use cases:
- We’re using Vertex AI to drive best practices around machine learning operations (MLOps). Read the Google Cloud blog to learn more about our MLOps partnership.
- We’re using Google Bard for large language model (LLM) summary and synthesis. We’re analyzing heterogeneous, unstructured data sets to extract and export information about the equipment and parts inventory in our Equinix IBX® data centers.
- We’re running Coral TPUs on IoT devices to bring local AI capabilities into our Equinix IBX sites. We’re also performing a proof of concept for using AI-enabled IoT devices to predict failures of chiller pumps and uninterruptible power supply systems. This work could ultimately lead to more resilient data centers for our customers.
- Finally, over the long term, we’re looking for opportunities to turn our AI/ML work into customer-facing services, which we’d make available via the Google Cloud Marketplace.
In the short time we’ve been leveraging Google AI/ML capabilities internally, we’ve seen dramatic results:
- It’s now significantly easier for us to manage new workloads and use cases.
- We’re now able to bring in new data sources in two weeks, when it previously took up to six weeks.
- We’ve reduced our time to market by over 50% and doubled our ROI.
We’re also proud to have been recognized as a 2023 Google Cloud Customer Awards winner for our work with Google AI technology. We look forward to applying the advances we’ve made to help deliver even better outcomes for our customers.
AI models require the right infrastructure in the right places
Whatever hybrid multicloud infrastructure you’re running, Equinix can offer you the global reach and connectivity needed to use AI tools to their full potential. With 250 Equinix IBX data centers spread across six continents, Platform Equinix® allows you to deploy infrastructure where you need it to support your distributed AI workloads. For example, if you need to store AI workloads or data within a certain jurisdiction to comply with data sovereignty or privacy requirements, access to colocation services in key markets allows you to do that without having to sacrifice global connectivity.
In addition, our portfolio of digital infrastructure services can help provide the flexibility and scalability you need to keep up with data growth. This includes Equinix Fabric® for software-defined interconnection. With Equinix Fabric, you can set dedicated virtual connections to your cloud providers, other ecosystem partners, or between your own infrastructure in different locations. As your needs change, you can grow those connections accordingly. Equinix Fabric connections of 25 and 50 Gbps are now available with Google Cloud; these new high-speed virtual connections are well-suited to support high-bandwidth use cases such as AI and ML.
Google Cloud customers can also benefit from access to Equinix digital ecosystems, which include thousands of enterprises and service providers. This means that as they deploy Google Cloud services, they can connect those services with their chosen network service providers, any enterprises they partner with, and any other cloud providers they may use as part of their hybrid multicloud architecture.
Learn more about our partnership with Google Cloud and how it pays dividends for our joint customers.
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