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Long before the era of the hyperscalers and neoclouds, and decades ahead of the AI data center boom, there was Equinix .
Described as a colocation facility, Equinix provides data center space for over 10,500 customers, offering space, power, cooling and security for companies that need a place to house their servers, routers and storage systems.
That experience, dating back to the 1998 dot-com bonanza, has given Equinix an important and expanding role in the artificial intelligence data center market, where hyperscalers are expected to spend over $5 trillion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs Research . On Wednesday, Equinix inked a deal with Nvidia that gives customers a flexible way to run their AI models on open-source cloud platform Together AI.
Equinix's stock price is up 33% this year, beating all of megacap tech and lifting the company's market cap to $100 billion. It's by far the most valuable data center real estate investment trust (REIT), ahead of Digital Realty, which has a market cap of $68 billion.
Equinix vs. S&P 500 this year Hyperscalers like Amazon and Google , and neoclouds like CoreWeave are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on infrastructure, with an outsized amount of that going to serve major AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Equinix, by contrast, rents out space in its facilities to customers of all shapes and sizes that can run servers on a variety of compute platforms, from Nvidia to AMD .
At an event in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday tied to the Nvidia deal, the chipmaker's CEO, Jensen Huang, spoke by video with Equinix CEO Adaire Fox-Martin. Huang said that the location of Equinix's facilities allow you to be "close to where the action is, where all the sensors are." And because the architecture is distributed, "you could both simultaneously be close and be far away," he said.
Equinix is one of the oldest names in the data center business. Its 281 legacy colocation facilities span 77 metropolitan areas across six continents, according to Maryam Zand, a vice president at the company who runs its AI ecosystem strategy.
"The companies you already use are all running on us," she says.
Financing details for Wednesday's deal weren't disclosed. Zand said Together AI, which offers access to 200 open-source models, will be the seller of record, billing its end customers who use the new program. Called Equinix Inference Exchange, it will be available in the first quarter of 2027.
While AI training teaches the model to learn from patterns in large amounts of data, inference refers to the decisions that are made based on new information. As AI evolves from simple call-and-answer chatbots to more complex agentic apps, inference has become more critical than training. That means workloads need to run on a wider variety of chips such as central processing units (CPUs), instead of relying solely on general-purpose workhorse graphics processing units (GPUs).
Equinix has mainly stuck to its old playbook of building smaller data centers in locations close to city centers, positioning them as network interconnection hubs. Digital Realty , by contrast, began to place greater emphasis on large-scale facilities for hypersca…