Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) has announced agreements for additional joint ventures in the form of limited liability partnerships with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, which when closed and built out will bring the xScaleTM data centre portfolio to greater than $6.9 billion across 32 facilities globally.

xScale data centres add to Equinix’s global platform of more than 220 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres by serving the core workload deployment needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies, including the world’s largest cloud service providers. After deal closing and buildout, the xScale data centre portfolio will span three regions:

• Europe: Dublin (three xScale data centers), Frankfurt (five xScale data centers), Helsinki (one xScale data center), London (two xScale data centers), Madrid (two xScale data centers), Milan (one xScale data center), Paris (four xScale data centers) and Warsaw (one xScale data center)

• Asia-Pacific: Osaka (three xScale data centers) and Tokyo (three xScale data centers)

• Americas: Mexico City (one xScale data center) and São Paulo (three xScale data centers)

Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix, said:  “For years, the world’s largest cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, have partnered with Equinix to leverage its global platform of more than 220 data centres to directly connect to their strategic business partners and customers.

“With our xScale program, these hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers. The joint venture arrangement of xScale enables these large deployments to be structured in an off-balance sheet model that aims to preserve capital for investment in our traditional retail data center and digital infrastructure business and maintain our strategic and financial flexibility.”

It is expected that the xScale portfolio of 32 facilities will provide more than 600 megawatts (MW) of power capacity when fully built out.

The JV projects in today’s announcement are expected to close in several waves over the course of 2021, pending regulatory approval and other closing conditions.

Under the terms of the JV agreements, GIC will own an 80% equity interest in the future joint ventures and Equinix will own the remaining 20% equity interest.

Also commenting, Jabez Tan, Head of Research, at Structure Research, said: “By building upon the xScale portfolio, Equinix is well-positioned to further accelerate the adoption of hybrid and multicloud as the IT architecture of choice for today’s businesses, while meeting hyperscalers’ needs for operational reliability, global reach and interconnectivity to rich ecosystems that are critical to serving their customers worldwide.”