The AI landscape is rapidly evolving, transforming how companies operate, compute and innovate. 2023 was a year of discovery, with generative AI in the spotlight. In 2024, organizations focused on AI model training and applying practical GenAI use cases. And now that we’re a few months into 2025, we’re seeing the shift in focus from AI model training to model tuning and inference in real time to fuel a new wave of AI agents that can reason through complex problems.
In early 2024, I wrote about how the Equinix fully managed private cloud service would enable enterprises to easily acquire NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing infrastructure to build and run custom generative AI models. Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, our service helps enterprises adopt advanced AI infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively, while leaving it to the experts to operate and manage that infrastructure globally.
Now, about a year later, AI is entering the age of “reasoning,” requiring new purpose-built infrastructure that enables the next generation of state-of-the-art models to be deployed in production at scale. These new “AI factories” are built on NVIDIA Blackwell supercomputing. To meet the computational demand, we’re excited to announce Equinix will be the first to offer NVIDIA Instant AI Factory, a managed service featuring the new NVIDIA DGX GB300 and DGX B300 systems, powered by NVIDIA Mission Control.
We plan to offer this new service in 45 markets worldwide. Customers will be able to access pre-configured liquid- or air-cooled infrastructure inside Equinix IBX® AI-ready data centers. The service will provide businesses with fully provisioned, intelligence-generating AI factories optimized for state-of-the-art model training and real-time inference workloads, eliminating months of pre-deployment AI infrastructure planning.
AI infrastructure is fundamental for enterprises driving the next industrial revolution. NVIDIA Instant AI Factory gives enterprises an express lane for deploying AI supercomputing with NVIDIA DGX systems with Blackwell at state-of-the art Equinix facilities around the globe.”- Charlie Boyle, Vice President of DGX Systems, NVIDIA
Meeting demand for advanced AI-ready infrastructure
As an Elite Data Center Provider partner in the NVIDIA Partner Network, we have built a deep technical relationship with NVIDIA. We understand the complexity and distinctive characteristics of the advanced NVIDIA technology stack, enabling us to help enterprises quickly upgrade to next-generation accelerated computing. Enterprises require infrastructure that is optimized to meet the demands of AI, and NVIDIA Instant AI Factory provides them with the latest NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems at Equinix AI-ready data centers to meet that demand.
As part of our strategic partnership with NVIDIA, we’ve optimized space, power, cooling and networking capabilities to remove the burden of our customers having to design, build and maintain their own high-performance data centers. Specifically, we’ve scaled our investment in liquid-cooled infrastructure to deliver direct-to-chip liquid cooling and enhanced air cooling in our AI-ready data centers.
Our high-performance data centers are designed and built for energy efficiency, multi-level security, flexibility, and scalability. They also offer access to our industry-leading portfolio of on-ramps to all major cloud providers. Deploying NVIDIA Instant AI Factory managed by Equinix will help enterprises realize the fastest time to value for their AI initiatives.
Solving AI challenges with AI-ready infrastructure and expertise
Enterprises are navigating various challenges across the AI lifecycle, from training to fine-tuning to inference. Reducing time spent managing AI infrastructure is crucial to solving challenges that include:
Speeding time to market: Enterprises want to accelerate the use of AI to innovate and launch transformational products and services that give them a competitive advantage. The NVIDIA Instant AI Factory managed by Equinix frees enterprises to focus on continuous innovation that fuels their differentiation. Powered by NVIDIA Mission Control, a unified operations and orchestration software platform that automates the complex management of AI factories and workloads, NVIDIA Instant AI Factory helps enterprises easily transition from pretraining to post-training—and now test-time scaling—with speed and efficiency to accelerate AI.
Addressing AI complexity: AI technology is evolving at an increasingly fast pace, and so too are its related infrastructure requirements. These infrastructure requirements, such as liquid cooling, are often beyond the scope of enterprise on-premises data centers. Many businesses also lack talent with the necessary knowledge and skillsets to manage AI infrastructure. Instead, they can deploy at Equinix and get the depth of expertise available with our managed services solution.
Meeting sustainability goals: It’s logical to assume powerful GPUs strain sustainability endeavors. Instead, they are the most efficient way to meet AI workload compute needs. While the amount of power used within a specific time frame is higher, GPUs complete large processing jobs much faster than CPUs offering greater performance per unit of energy consumed. With the help of continuous software innovation, GPUs continuously increase operating efficiency over time.
Choosing where to deploy GPUs also makes a difference when it comes to sustainability. We designed Equinix data centers to operate efficiently and use energy from clean, renewable sources whenever possible. In fact, 235+ of our IBX colocation data centers already have 100% coverage, and we’ve achieved 96% renewable energy coverage globally.
Accessing distributed data sources: Businesses are leveraging distributed data sources as part of their strategy to harness the power of AI. Doing so requires secure, high-speed, low-latency connections to all data sources globally. It carries the added benefit of ensuring compliance with data privacy and sovereignty requirements. At Equinix AI-ready data centers, customers can seamlessly connect to networks, clouds and ecosystem partners through both virtual and physical private connectivity solutions to exchange data with unmatched security, predictable performance, and reliability.
Use case: Distributed data in motion
Alembic is a marketing intelligence SaaS company that provides customers with data-driven insights into their marketing activities to optimize spending and sales funnel movement. The company needed to bring a private AI stack closer to its customers to enable higher-performance inference at the edge. The company deployed DGX infrastructure in an Equinix AI-ready colocation data center to enhance the foundation models brought in from cloud providers with its own proprietary data. Alembic leveraged Equinix’s ecosystem of NSPs and Equinix Fabric® for high-speed connectivity to its customers and partners, ultimately delivering a higher-performance product.
Advancing your AI initiatives with a trusted partner
Equinix has strategically placed its AI-ready data centers in the world’s most connected markets. Our globally distributed, highly interconnected facilities put our customers close to enterprises, cloud and network service providers, and industry-specific ecosystems. This proximity enables fast, low-latency connections for superior network performance.
Equinix AI-ready data centers provide a scalable and future-proof infrastructure foundation, enabling enterprises to advance their AI capabilities as demands evolve. Businesses can support the next generation of power-intensive AI workloads with scalable power capacity and high-density cooling technologies.
Platform Equinix® includes a network of data centers in 70+ key markets in 34 countries for global reach, compliance and performance. In addition to providing traditional colocation, we offer the flexibility of digital services, private connectivity solutions and access to 220+ cloud on-ramps to all the major providers.
Equinix Fabric, our software-defined interconnection solution, provides secure, private, high-performance connectivity. It’s available on demand in 60+ global metros to seamlessly interconnect your workloads and data.
Wherever you’re at in your AI journey, Equinix AI-ready data centers provide the foundation for moving forward. To learn more about how the NVIDIA Instant AI Factory can help accelerate your deployment of AI supercomputing with NVIDIA DGX systems with Blackwell at Equinix, contact us today.
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