DEVELOP AND OPERATE 2 XSCALE DATA CENTERS IN SYDNEY

Equinix and PGIM Real Estate, the real estate investment and financing arm of Prudential Financial’s global asset management business, have just announced an agreement to establish a joint venture in the form of a limited liability partnership to develop and operate data centers in Sydney, Australia.

The US$575 million joint venture is set to develop and operate two xScaleTM data centers which will be known as SY9x and SY10x. Both facilities are expected to provide more than 55MW of power capacity to serve the needs of the partners’ targeted group of hyperscale customers.

“As digital transformation accelerates across all industries, hybrid multicloud is becoming the IT architecture of choice for leading businesses,” said Charles Meyers, President and CEO of Equinix.

“These companies recognize that digital infrastructure is a source of competitive advantage, and they are leveraging Platform Equinix to directly connect and operate close to the largest cloud companies powering this infrastructure. Our new relationship with PGIM Real Estate follows our successful partnership with GIC and will enable the world’s largest hyperscalers to expand within the Equinix ecosystem in Australia.”

xScaleTM is Equinix’s hyperscale data center partnership program. In 2020, Equinix formed a joint venture that is worth more than $1 billion in cash and assets with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC to develop and operate three data centers in Japan.

In June, Equinix and GIC expanded their joint venture portfolios with $3.9 Billion to deliver xScale data center portfolio across Europe, providing more than 600MW of power capacity when fully built out. The planned facilities for Europe include three data centers in Dublin, five in Frankfurt, one in Helsinki, two in London, two in Madrid, one in Milan, four in Paris, and one in Warsaw.

Combined with Equinix’s existing hyperscale joint ventures in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas, the new joint venture with PGIM will bring the global xScale data center portfolio to more than $7.5 billion across 34 facilities, and an expected power capacity of over 675MW when the current sites are fully developed.

“We are extremely pleased to partner with Equinix on this investment in Sydney, and we look forward to expanding this strategic relationship in other markets, thereby providing our investors further access to the increasingly important digital infrastructure sector. This is a highly symbiotic venture between two market-leading firms with complementary business models and global capabilities,” said Eric Adler, Chief Executive Officer of PGIM Real Estate.

According to Equinix, the first xScale data center in Sydney (SY9x) is expected to open in Q1 2022.