Equinix ME1 in Melbourne

Equinix is building a new data center in Melbourne worth $84 million. This new facility is code-named “ME2” and will be Equinix fourth data center in Melbourne which is coming after ME1, ME4 and ME5.

ME2 will be sited in Port Melbourne, about six kilometers from Melbourne’s central business district. The new facility will therefore be put adjacent to ME1, with direct physical access between the buildings via a secure link bridge.

ME2 is designed to have a total colocation space of 8,190 square meters (approximately 88,000 square feet) when fully built. Equinix however, has split the development of the new Melbourne facility into phases with the first phase having 2,730 meters (approximately 29,300 square feet) of colocation space.

The first phase of the new Melbourne data center is expected to open in Q3 2019 having a capacity of 1,000 cabinets. According to Samuel Lee, Equinix APAC president, ME2 will offer a wide range of interconnection options, including Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric), which allows businesses to set up on-demand and secure connections to more than 1,400 participants across all regions globally.

The colocation giant currently runs 40 data centers across 12 APAC markets, and have invested over $800 million into building and expanding its presence in the APAC region in the last 3 years. Equinix is not relenting in its commitment to the APAC market as ME2 is just the latest facility the company is adding to the market this year, others include new data centers in Singapore, Hamburg, Seoul, and Sydney.

“The past few years have been an exciting time of growth for Equinix globally as we aim to provide the best possible support for our customers navigating digital transformation,” said Lee.

For Equinix, Australia is a key market in the APAC region. A major investment is the acquisition of Metronode in 2018 at A$1.035 billion (approx. US$804 million) which added 10 data centers to the company’s footprint. That is not the last of it, as the company still looks to opening the Sydney (SY5) and just-announced Melbourne (ME2) data centers later this year, giving Equinix a national footprint of 17 IBX data centers across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane.

“We started in Melbourne only four years ago with our green fields build of ME1. Fast forward to today we now have four sites with two distinct campus locations in Melbourne. These sites house a combined ecosystem that provides the perfect building blocks to enable digital transformation,” said Jeremy Deutsch, MD, Australia, Equinix.