4 Ways a High-Performance Data Center Could Help Your Business

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in October 2024. It was updated in October 2025 to include the latest information.

CIOs, CTOs and other technical leaders are a diverse group with different backgrounds and priorities. But there’s one thing that makes them alike: They all have better things to do with their time than manage a data center.

These leaders have long looked to colocation services to help offload this unwanted chore, giving them more time to focus on their core responsibilities. However, not all colocation data centers are equal. By deploying in a high-performance data center, businesses can get benefits that extend far beyond space and power. In fact, the right colocation partner can help them tackle some of the biggest business challenges they’re facing today, including:

• Connecting with the right partners in the right places
• Ensuring low-latency connectivity at the edge
• Accelerating AI adoption
• Meeting sustainability goals

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1.    Ensure proximity to partners and service providers

No business can be successful working alone. This has always been the case, but it’s especially true now. Collaborating with different partners and using on-demand services from different providers has become the norm; businesses that aren’t prepared for this reality will inevitably fall behind.

Connecting with the right partners depends on having the right infrastructure in the right locations. Many businesses recognize that colocation can help with this. Modern colocation data centers have become hubs for digital ecosystems, bringing together thousands of businesses in the same places. This is particularly true in core metros that attract high concentrations of clouds, neoclouds, networks, SaaS providers and enterprise partners.

In some cases, you may even be literally colocated in the same facility as your preferred partners and service providers. Your data and workloads will be able to reach those partners without even having to leave the building. This ensures low latency and predictability and helps protect your company’s vital intellectual property.

Air Canada worked with Equinix to go from traditional, centralized data centers to interconnected, high-performance data centers. The airline gained access to a global ecosystem of clouds, networks, and industry-specific providers like Amadeus. They’re now using interconnection capabilities to help improve the customer experience via partnerships with Uber and other providers.

To learn more, read the full Air Canada story.

2.    Deploy and connect all the right edge locations

Latency is a byproduct of distance, and the only way to keep latency low is to place infrastructure in proximity to data sources and end users. Enterprises know they need to deploy at the digital edge to keep distances short, move very large datasets with minimal delay and support a growing array of latency-sensitive applications.

The edge as a concept is fairly simple, but it can get very complex in practice. That’s because the edge isn’t any one specific location; every business has different edge locations. For instance, a global manufacturer may need edge data centers in any metro where they have factories. These edge locations may not have the same concentration of cloud and network providers as the core metros mentioned above, but they’re still going to be in large cities like Detroit or Stockholm.

Companies in the mining or oil and gas industries have a completely different definition of the edge. They need to operate in remote areas that offer very poor connectivity. They may not have direct access to a colocation data center nearby, but they can still reach one via a dedicated high-performance network connection. This would allow them to access cloud providers and ecosystem partners despite the distance.

Regardless of whether your edge is in the big city or off the beaten path, choosing the right colocation partner can help. Equinix’s data center footprint is dense enough that the majority of all internet users worldwide are within 10 milliseconds of an Equinix connection. Also, for customers with remote operations, our ecosystem of network service providers can help bridge the last mile between their sites and the nearest Equinix IBX® colocation data center.

One customer that worked with Equinix to implement digital infrastructure at the edge is Stadler. This global train manufacturer needed a digital presence in many different production, component and service locations across Europe and the U.S. Watch the Stadler video below to learn how Equinix helped them do it.

3.    Accelerate AI adoption with infrastructure that’s both powerful and flexible

Today’s AI workloads are very compute-intensive, and the size of the datasets used for model training is only going to grow. Getting the compute capacity to support those workloads—including powerful GPUs—can be difficult, especially if you try to do it yourself inside a conventional private data center. You’d need to figure out how to deploy the right hardware and back it up with advanced cooling and redundant, reliable power supplies. Even if you can somehow do this, your data center would still be isolated, making it difficult to connect with all the partners that help fuel your AI success.

The right colocation provider can help you ensure flexibility to support distributed AI workloads. This includes choosing different locations and infrastructure options for training and inference workloads. You can take advantage of AI applications in the cloud when it makes sense to do so, while avoiding the issues that sometimes arise when placing AI datasets directly on cloud native infrastructure. This allows you to keep costs down and maintain control over your data.

Finally, a high-performance data center helps optimize GPU utilization. Demand for new GPUs has skyrocketed, but many companies aren’t getting the full value of their existing GPU investments. This is due to latency: GPUs often process data faster than new datasets can reach them, resulting in underutilization. A high-performance data center helps businesses access advanced network infrastructure and deploy in the right locations to minimize the distance data has to travel. Together, these capabilities help protect GPUs from latency.

The global auto parts manufacturer Continental worked with Equinix to accelerate their AI learning. In just two weeks, the company was able to place GPUs from NVIDIA and storage from IBM inside an Equinix high-performance data center. This empowered them to perform 14x more AI experiments. In turn, this helped them bring advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) solutions to market faster and thus improve vehicle safety.

Read the full Continental story.

4.    Get help meeting your sustainability goals

These days, every business has sustainability goals of some kind. I can’t remember the last time I looked at a request for proposal that didn’t include a sustainability component. Meeting these goals is another example of something that’s essentially impossible for a business to do alone.

Every partner or service provider you work with impacts your sustainability results, for better or worse. Your suppliers’ direct emissions become your indirect emissions, also known as your Scope 3 emissions. That’s why it’s so important to work with partners that have demonstrated sustainability leadership.

If you partner with a high-performance data center provider, you can benefit from all the work that provider has already put into pursuing sustainability initiatives. At Equinix, we’ve worked hard to make our data centers both clean and efficient. This means we’re dedicated to limiting resource consumption whenever possible, while also helping to replenish the resources we do use from renewable sources.

Data center efficiency initiatives we’re pursuing include operating equipment within wider temperature ranges and using liquid cooling for high-density workloads like AI. We’re also pursuing 100% renewable energy coverage for our global data center portfolio by 2030; we reached 96% coverage during 2024.

Learn more about our sustainability strategy: Access our interactive sustainability report.

Take the next step in your data center journey

There are many benefits to deploying in a high-performance data center operated by a global colocation provider, and we’ve only scratched the surface of those benefits here. To learn more about what your business can achieve without your traditional data center holding you back, access your copy of High-Performance Data Centers for Dummies today.