The financial figures thrown around, willy-nilly, by companies developing AI data centers have become so enormous that they often feel meaningless.

OpenAI, SoftBank, and chums plan to drop $500 billion for Stargate, and Meta is rumored to be looking at a $200 billion campus somewhere in the US. Projects with a price tag of $1 billion are so commonplace that, for many, they barely merit talking about.

In comparison to Stargate, the $15 billion that colo giant Equinix and its partners have allocated for a joint venture to build hyperscale data centers in the US feels like a drop in the ocean, but in the real world it still represents a significant outlay. Krupal Raval, managing director of the company’s xScale programme, which develops AI infrastructure for big clients, believes it can have a big impact.

“It’s almost embarrassing to talk about the $15 billion because sometimes it feels like we’re pounding our chest and saying ‘look how much money we’re putting out in investment capital’,” he says.

“But really, it’s necessary because of how different AI in terms of the scale and design. The product xScale is offering is quite different to anything we’ve done historically.”

Scaling up

Equinix has been building data centers under the xScale brand since 2019, when it partnered with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, to create a joint venture to build hyperscale data centers in key European markets.

The brand has since spread around the world, with Equinix pursuing the JV model with GIC as a key partner. Together, the pair had jointly invested more than $7.5 billion in xScale-branded data centers, which have opened in countries including the UK, Japan, France, Brazil, and South Korea. On the company’s February 2025 earnings call, Equinix CEO Adaire Fox-Martin said the company had 16 xScale projects under construction around the world, which will offer customers 34,000 additional cabinets with 165MW total capacity. Total operational capacity for xScale data centers is 400MW globally, Fox-Martin added.

Conquering America has been a more recent ambition for xScale. In April 2024, the company formed a $600 million JV with PGIM Real Estate, the property investment and financing arm of Prudential Financial’s global asset management business, to fund a 28MW data center in Silicon Valley, the first phase of which came online last year. It has also purchased land for xScale data centers in Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas, Texas.

Raval says the decision to delay its entry into the US market was a strategic one for xScale. “We’ve intentionally been everywhere but America,” he says. “When people asked Charles [Meyers, former Equinix CEO] if we were interested in the US market, his answer was always that we didn’t want to be provider 55 in the States trying to address that market. We had to see value for our shareholders and our customers, we don’t just do things to put pins on a map.”

AI has changed the picture significantly, Raval says, and with demand going through the roof he believes the time is right for Equinix to make its move. “We’re seeing our customers saying they’re willing to work with ‘Johnny startup’ if it means getting a 2025 or 2026 delivery, but that’s not sustainable or scalable,” he says. “I don’t mean to denigrate the competition, because some of it is really good, but some of it is not so great, so we want to work with our partners to provide a stable and credible option.”

Having seen many of its rivals scoop up billions of dollars in AI-related projects already, some may say Equinix is late to the party, but the company’s timing could prove to be spot on. Donald Trump’s re-election as US president has seen the White House ramp up protectionist policies and reiterate an “America first” approach, and left tech companies scrambling to invest in the US in a bid to curry favor with the new regime. This means data center space designed specifically for these firms is likely to be snapped up fast, despite fears that the overall AI infrastructure market may be slowing down.

The latest xScale JV involves Equinix, GIC and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). It aims to raise $15 billion to purchase land for several 100MW plus data center campuses in the US, eventually adding more than 1.5GW of new capacity for Equinix’s hyperscale customers.

CPP Investments and GIC each control a 37.5 percent equity interest in the joint venture, with Equinix owning a 25 percent stake. Each party has made equity commitments, and it is expected the JV will take on debt to bring investable capital up to $15 billion.

So far, Equinix has stayed tight-lipped on the locations it is targeting for the new campuses, and despite DCD’s prompting, Raval doesn’t let the cat out of the bag. “None of our customers are saying ‘go here and we’ll give you our book of business’,” he says. “But equally we have a pretty good sense of where the needs are, so that’s where we’ll be targeting our investments.”

He continues: “Outside of the JV, we’ve acquired land for an xScale campus in Atlanta. It’s not yet in the JV but logically it would be – that will be up to the investors and partners. That investment is the playbook for xScale, finding sites that can support multiple hundreds of megawatts in good metros. It’s an in-fill strategy rather than, ‘let’s just build a gigawatt out in the sticks’.”

Building in flexibility

Raval says the xScale will be designed with the future in mind, as the AI matures and moves away from large-scale training of models into the nitty gritty of inference and providing services for businesses.

“We’ve spent a lot of time doing design workshops with our customers so we’re on the journey together,” he says. “That gives us confidence. There’s no guarantee what we’re deciding now is the right answer, so we want to build flexibility into our products.”

This flexibility covers things like being ready for rapidly increasing rack densities and different cooling systems, Raval says. He adds: “This comes at a bit of a premium in terms of time and money, but we would rather invest to have that flexibility. Some of our peers are keen to just get stuff knocked out quickly, but we hope that by doing it this way we can offer ongoing value to our clients.”

For Raval, managing such an array of joint ventures around the world is a sizeable challenge, but one that he enjoys. “We take pride in being methodical and getting things right, and my goal is to move fast and get things right,” he says. “We have great support from our investment partners, and I have 14,000 colleagues at Equinix who are all really smart people and can offer differing opinions on how to do things. That doesn’t come for free and it can slow us down at times, but it’s a big net benefit and I’m proud of what we’re doing here.”