It will also extend 23 data centres as part of this year’s €1.5 billion to €1.7 billion non-recurring capital investment programme.
The global interconnection and data centre firm will open new or extended facilities across Europe, including in what it describes as the growth markets of London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Helsinki, Madrid, Paris, Sofia, Stockholm, Warsaw and Zurich.
Equinix says it plays a strategic role in advancing enterprises’ digital transformation, for which global businesses are demanding increasing levels of direct and private connectivity with customers and partners.
This interconnection is best achieved through ecosystems of clouds, networks and services that Equinix offers almost worldwide.
By providing this new capacity in 2019, it continues to extend Platform Equinix, so companies can deploy their IT infrastructure and services “at the digital edge in more than 50 metros across the globe”.
Moving away from cloud
Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud, instead originating at and being processed in decentralised compute centres physically closer to where they are needed.
For instance, as Gartner explains, “Analytics need to be closer to the edge for near-real-time feedback, business process optimisation, and to avoid the impact of latency and insufficient bandwidth”.
Multi-access edge compute (MEC) or edge computing will also be key aspects of telcos’ 5G network architectures and services.
Equinix operates 202 IBX data centres in 24 countries and 52 cities across 2.06 million gross square metres of data centre space. It has more than 341,000 total interconnections that link companies within the Equinix ecosystem, and more than 9,800 customers, including more than 1,800 networks and more than 2,900 cloud and IT service providers.