Description
Equinix is an American multinational company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that specializes in Internet connection and data centers. The company is a leader in global colocation data center market share, with 229 data centers in 27 countries on five continents.
It is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol EQIX, and as of December 2020, it had approximately 10,000 employees globally. The company converted to a real estate investment trust (REIT) in January 2015.
History
Equinix was founded in 1998 by Al Avery and Jay Adelson, two facilities managers at Digital Equipment Corporation. The firm promoted its data center platform as a neutral place where competing networks could connect and share data traffic.[8] The firm capitalized on the "network effect," through which each new customer would broaden the appeal of its platform. It expanded to Asia-Pacific in 2002 and Europe in 2007, followed by Latin America in 2011 and the Middle East in 2012.
In 2018, according to data collected by the online publication Sludge, Equinix signed three contracts with the U.S. agency Customs and Border Protection to provide "information technology support equipment" totalling over $5 million. In September 2020, the company shifted its branding to describe itself as a "digital infrastructure company".
