Equinix, Inc. (EQIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Equinix's 2021 Analyst Day. It's been 3 years since we were last on stage with you, sharing with you our long-term vision and financial guidance. And I know it's been over a year that many of us have seen each other in person, and we're still looking forward to seeing you again one day in the not-too-distant future. That said, you're going to have the next 5 hours with us, albeit virtual, but do recognize there'll be many breaks. Now one of my required responsibilities, as many of you know, is that we will be making some forward-looking statements. And as such, we would encourage you to review our SEC filings on sec.gov, our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filing, for the inherent risks and uncertainties with forward-looking statements. So as we get started today, it really is about how Equinix will expand, extend and innovate its evolving platform. There's 5, 3 themes -- sorry, there's 5 key themes that we'd like you to take away. Number one is the strong execution that is fueling our significant momentum -- sorry, pardon me. There's broad secular trends that are creating an outstanding opportunity for us, the trends reinforcing our distinct advantage. We have a 3-pronged strategy that will drive our growth, and we're going to deliver long-term, sustainable shareholder value. So with that, let's get started. And thank you for joining us today. We appreciate it. [Presentation]

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President and Chief Executive Officer, Charles Meyers.

Hello, everybody. It feels like forever that we've been waiting for this day. So I'm really excited to be here with you, and I want to join Keith in welcoming all of you. This video that we just showed you, I've probably seen it a dozen times, and it still gets me kind of choked up, and it certainly makes me smile. To be the platform where the world comes together, that's something that -- an idea that makes me spring out of bed in the morning. It inspires me, and I know it ignites the passion of our 10,000 employees around the world. So I'm really excited to be here with you today and to share the Equinix story. I wish we could be together in person, not possible this time. But we -- as Keith said, we really do look forward to seeing you in person in the not-too-distant future. But there's some benefits for virtual, and so we're -- part of that is reach, and so we're really happy to invite and welcome a record audience for an Analyst Day for Equinix here today. So thank you for investing your time to be here with us. A lot's happened in the 3 years since we were last together. On the personal front, life marches on. Yes, despite multiple COVID delays, we had a beautiful wedding recently. So congratulations to [ McKenna and ] Patrick. And then we've also added a third grandchild. And in doing so, we broke the gender barrier, adding a very lucky grandson to our otherwise female-dominated crew. So quick shout-out to my grandbabies, Tatum, [ Tegan ] and Simon. On the Equinix front, it's been -- despite the pandemic, it's been an incredible 3 years. We've added $1.6 billion in revenue, more than the entire company when I joined, and nearly all of that in this time frame organic. We added 29 new data centers, 1 every 5 weeks. We've added more than 100,000 net new interconnections, really reinforcing interconnection as foundational to our customer value proposition. And that and many other things that you'll see in the published version of my presentation, all of those things culminating in an exciting recent milestone, and that's Equinix's inclusion in the Fortune 500. Something that's made possible only by the incredible commitment of my 10,000 team members around the world and, of course, by the trust that our customers place in Equinix. So thank you to our customers. And as I told our internal team, 461 isn't the summit. It's just base camp on our journey, and what a journey it is. To say we're living in extraordinary times would certainly be an understatement. Having faced, and in many respects continuing to face some of the most challenging times in human history. We're confronted by a host of obstacles and opportunities. Some new, some as old as humankind itself. But there's 2 things that really jump out at me over the last 18 months. Number one, the resilience of the human spirit. And number two, the power of digital to transform our lives and reshape our world. And Equinix is in the incredibly fortunate position to play a key role in bringing these forces together. Consider this. This is a commercial drone that can generate terabytes of data in a single flight. Back in 2007, the unit cost of one of these reasonable quality drone, north of $100,000. Our DNA, in 2007, similarly, the sequencing of a human genome cost more than $10 million. Today, both of these things cost less than $1,000. These are just 2 high-profile examples of what are probably tens of thousands or millions of similar dynamics that are creating a really pervasive global trend, and that's this. Data is being created, moved, analyzed and stored at unprecedented and accelerating rates. It's a tsunami of digital, creating massive opportunity across our globe, trillions of devices, zettabytes of data, petabytes of traffic, all these combining to change our lives, shape our economies and hopefully improve our world. The World Economic Forum estimates that there'll be more than $100 trillion of direct and indirect economic impact created by digital by 2025, fueling massive opportunity and triggering rapid market share shifts as disruption finds its way to every corner of the global economy. It's simple. Businesses across every industry will adapt or they'll perish. And with $100 trillion flowing into the global economy, demand for digital infrastructure will continue to explode, and digital leaders will pave the way. But the nature of digital infrastructure is changing, make no mistake about it. It's more distributed, it's more on-demand and it's more ecosystem-connected than ever before. Let's start with distributed. The sun is quickly setting on the days of the centralized data center. IDC predicts that by 2025, more than 50% of enterprise data is going to be generated at the edge. This is dictating distributed infrastructure for enterprises and for the service providers that are looking to serve them, and this is showing up in powerful ways at Platform Equinix already. Our 3 region customer count since 2018 is up 37%, and these customers now account for 62% of our total MRR. They have higher interconnection rates, strong pricing, lower churn, and all of that translates to higher customer lifetime values. Let me give you a really concrete example that brings home this powerful trend toward distributed infrastructure. Behind me is a deployment map of one of our European Global 2000 customers circa 2016. They had a very traditional, centralized, siloed, fully managed IT architecture. Several on-premise data centers, combined with some third-party colo, including one Equinix location, all of that centered around their corporate headquarters and an expansive and very expensive network, bringing all of these users back to these data centers. And Equinix had just a small piece of the pie, about $5,000 MRR at the time. But this customer understood the digital imperative. They embraced cloud and they rearchitected for agility, for performance and for broad interconnection to their ecosystem. Equinix enabled reach and proximity to all of their preferred cloud providers in all of their strategic locations. Today, they operate a state-of-the-art hybrid and multi-cloud architecture. It spans 12 Equinix IBXs, 70 physical cross-connects and more than 600 virtual cross-connects on Equinix Fabric. This customer now generates over $250,000 in MRR, 50x growth since 2016 and yields at $2,500 per cab. And this situation is far from unique on platform Equinix. Most of our large enterprise customers are already multi-cloud and multi-metro and trending towards this type of architecture. In fact, if just half of the Global 2000 migrated towards this -- to this type of architecture, it would generate over $3 billion in incremental opportunity just with our existing reach and our existing services portfolio. It's simple. The action is at the digital edge, and Equinix is the best manifestation of the digital edge now and for many years to come. In addition to being more distributed, the customer need is more on-demand. Cloud computing has forever reshaped the expectations of customers. Consumers want to consume -- I mean users want to consume and combine value from their preferred partners quickly and easily, and Equinix has been responding to that by evolving our capabilities since the launch of Cloud Fabric back in 2014. We've developed a fully software-defined, fully API-enabled interconnection platform that's now evolved to our market-leading Equinix Fabric offering. This is a $100 million plus business and the anchor in our value proposition to customers and to prospects. The data is inescapable. Simplicity and usability drive consumption. And Fabric has proven the case, delivering dramatic unit growth, as you can see here, and even stronger revenue growth as ARPU grows. And the virtual interconnection momentum is continuing to fuel demand for physical cross-connects. And the customer need is also more ecosystem-connected. McKinsey estimates that 30% of the global economy will be ecosystem-driven by 2025, and it's our platform that's making that possible. Since 2018, our customers are continuing to scale their connections to our ecosystem. Just look at this graphic. It shows the interconnection profile of our top customers. On the service provider side, our top 100 service provider customers average 1,700 interconnects to an average of 156 unique counterparties. Staggering. And on the enterprise side, the average -- top 100 averaged 427 interconnects to an average of 64 unique counterparties. Truly amazing momentum in our ecosystems, driving a growing addressable market. Simply put, traditional supply side TAM estimates are underestimating the opportunity for Equinix. As undifferentiated retail competitors continue to struggle in the face of cloud substitution, Equinix is gathering share in retail. We're using xScale to tap into a rapidly growing hyperscale market. And as traditional technology markets dislocate into as-a-service models, we're tapping into our interconnection and our digital infrastructure services portfolio to gather huge pools of demand that are new in increasing our addressable market. Together, these will create what we think, by 2025, will be an $80-plus billion addressable market that can easily fuel our growth to $10 billion and beyond. And we're not just growing for growth's sake. We're mining the juiciest parts of the TAM by scaling the rich ecosystems that reside at Equinix. At its root, the Equinix business model remains powerful in its simplicity. Service providers come for the networks, for the clouds, for the relief, for the reach, for the reliability. And those service providers attract enterprises and the virtuous circle begins. And this flywheel is spinning like crazy at Equinix. Strong unit growth across all our ecosystems, as you can see here, with particular strength in network, which is an entrée into the enterprise for us, increasingly, and really a hyper-growth phase in the cloud ecosystem. And as distributed, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures become entrenched as the architecture of choice, leadership in the cloud ecosystem matters more than ever. I love this chart. So it might take a little bit of time to stare at it off-line, but it's a visualization of our cloud coverage across the world. It's one of my favorite charts from our internal operating review, and I wanted to share it with you today. This is really a visualization of how billions of dollars can translate to leadership in the cloud ecosystem. With direct, multi-cloud access in more than 30 markets around the world and a 40% share of cloud ramps in our markets, we continue to be the provider of choice when cloud proximity matters. So as we look forward, we're going to continue to exercise 3 key levers to sustain our growth and momentum. First, scale. We're going to continue to double down on the strength of our core business, investing to further scale our go-to-market machine to win new customers, putting capital [ to ] work to add capacity in existing markets and targeting specific sources of operating leverage to drive expanded margins as we drive to our target of 50%. Second, we're going to continue our strong track record of expanding the reach of our platform, adding new retail markets to extend our global reach and, as you've seen in our recent announcements, accelerating our aspirations in xScale. And we'll continue to innovate at levels that others simply can't match, delivering new features and new services to support our customers on their digital transformation journey, enhancing our APIs to extend our ecosystems and evolving our processes and our systems to deliver operating leverage and enhance customer experience through automation and self-service. So let me talk a little bit about each of these key areas of focus. A few years ago, we unified our global go-to-market operations, bringing together sales, marketing and our customer experience teams to create a powerful force to serve our customers, and that team continues to deliver great results. They've established awareness of Equinix, not just as a data center company, but as a trusted partner in digital transformation. They've added QVH at a steady pace to fuel growth. They powerfully tapped into the strength of the channel to amplify our reach. And they've worked with our product teams to drive adoption of self-service, all of that translating to sustained strength in bookings and in revenue. I meet with almost all of our new sales employees as part of a program that we call SOR. It's our sales onboarding to really shorten their ramp to productivity. During those sessions, we talk a lot about hybrid cloud, or about digital transformation, all that, but one of the things I want to try to impress on our new sellers is this. One of the most powerful tools in your sales kit is this, the global map, and we continue to put our capital to work to fuel this advantage. We're going to add about nearly 30,000 cabinets of retail and almost 70 megawatts of xScale in the next 4 quarters alone. And the bulk of that, about 70% is going to be deployed in our major interconnected campuses around the world, where we enjoy predictable fill rates, firm pricing and very attractive returns on capital. Finally, as we scale, it's not just about growing the top line. As we grow, we need to continue to realize operating leverage. We've identified several critical areas in the business that you see here where we can drive standardization, simplification and automation, bending the cost curve and providing a better experience for customers, for partners and for our employees. We're in an investment cycle in these initiatives, but they're central to our margin expansion goals that Keith is going to discuss in a little while. So now let's talk about extending the platform, starting with our geographic reach. We have an incredible track record in this area, extending both organically and inorganically. A decade ago, we were in only 10 markets, and we were the leader in only one of those, the United States. Today, we're in 30-plus markets around the world, and we're the #1 player in 2/3 of those markets. And some of our newest markets, markets like India and Mexico, are ripe for rapid expansion. We believe we can deploy significant amounts of capital with strong returns, and we're far from done. There's more of the world to cover, more markets of interest, including Southeast Asia and Africa, just to name a few. And thanks to our xScale efforts, our aspirations are not limited to only our retail business. As you recall, in 2018, I showed you this chart that outlined our strategy to accelerate our hyperscale business. We wanted to tap into the rapidly growing hyperscale demand by using JVs to extend our balance sheet, extending our cloud leadership and creating meaningful synergies with retail. Well, thanks to strong execution by our team and a great partner in GIC, we've seen tremendous success in executing on this strategy. So Keith is going to talk a little bit about how this translates into our financial results, but I wanted to offer a quantitative look at how 1 plus 1 equals 3 in terms of the synergies between xScale and our retail business. As you can see on this chart, on a megawatt basis, we've more than doubled since our last Analyst Day. In the retail side, on the lower part of the chart, we've added 50 megawatts in our small to mid-sized sweet spot. That's a lot of deals and a lot of MRR. On the large footprint side, the top part of the chart, our 1-megawatt-plus deals, we've added about 170 megawatts. About half of that destined for our JVs, the 2 sort of darker blue bars on the right-hand side, and that will grow significantly over the coming years as that scale ramps. The other half deployed in Equinix facilities, where we had either large retail deals like network nodes or cloud on-ramps; or xScale-type deals, maybe -- typically 5 megawatts or more, where we did not have xScale coverage or where there are limitations in us implementing our JV strategy. So all told, our hyperscale relationships represent between Equinix proper revenue and JV revenue, $1 billion a year plus business, and that's poised to accelerate further, again, as xScale ramps. And that's translating to cloud leadership and continued cloud leadership. We talked about the on-ramps, and Keith mentioned these as well. We're now at 175 strong, adding almost 100 since we were together 3 years ago. And that is driving the ultimate payoff, rapid growth in the cloud ecosystem. We're seeing 34% growth in interconnection into that, fueled, in large part, by enterprise connectivity into the cloud. We're delighted with xScale. We're beginning to see their impact in our results, and we're realizing compelling strategic benefits. Now let's talk briefly about our third key area of focus, a commitment to continued innovation across our portfolio. In a few minutes, Sara is going to talk in-depth about how we're delivering advanced features to enhance usability and customer experience; how we're supporting scalability, automation and energy efficiency to drive operating leverage; and how we're expanding our digital infrastructure portfolio -- digital infrastructure services portfolio, allowing us to deepen our relevance to customers and increase our share of wallet. We're excited about this 3-pronged approach to the business and believe it paints a very bright future for Equinix. But as I've said many times and in many forms, our approach to business always starts with people. Our ability to scale, to extend and to innovate starts with our ability to show up for each other in service, too. We believe our culture is a competitive advantage, and that notion is embraced by our teams. And not only embraced by our teams, it's beginning to be recognized by others. We're very proud of that recognition. But most importantly, that commitment to culture is fueling our ability to attract exceptional talent. And our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive workplace is allowing us to retain, to develop and to inspire this talent, building a place where every person, every day can confidently say, "I'm safe, I belong, and I matter." All of this is translating to organizational health and to levels [ of ] employee engagement that are best in our industry, and not only best in our industry, but among the best in the world. All of that is enabling us to be in service to our customers, to our communities and to you, our shareholders. Aligned with our values, we're also continuing to make bold commitments on sustainability, leaning in across all elements of ESG. On the environmental front, we're making exceptional strides towards our 100% renewable energy goal, sitting at more than 90% today. And as you saw in our announcements last week, we're proud to be the first in our industry to set a climate -- a global climate-neutral target, shooting for climate-neutral across our global operations by 2030. And this commitment is not just wishful thinking. It's backed by ongoing investment in an ambitious green financing agenda. In the social arena, we continue to unleash the power of human potential, investing in our diversity, inclusion and belonging efforts and in our Equinix impact efforts that are helping those in need across our communities around the world. At Equinix, ESG isn't a sidelight. It's embedded into every aspect of our business, with strong oversight and support from our Board and heavy levels of engagement from our frontline employees. So as I close, let me leave you with a few thoughts. The Equinix story is as exciting as it ever has been. Digital is truly transforming our world, driving unprecedented demand for digital infrastructure. And Equinix will continue to play a key role, fueling the exponential growth of cloud services and being an increasingly relevant partner to enterprises building hybrid infrastructure that is more distributed, more on-demand and more ecosystem-connected than ever before. The road ahead is one of sustained growth and increased operating leverage. And we have a variety of levers available to us to achieve those outcomes, winning more customers, serving them in more places with more ways to deliver value, all while unlocking the margin benefits of our unmatched scope and scale. So let me finish now where I started, with our purpose. We are inspired by our passion to be the platform where the world comes together. And we're proud to be an enabling force for our customers, unlocking their incredible potential to deliver innovations that enrich our work, our life and our planet. You're going to hear plenty more of that from Sara, from Karl and one of our customers and from Keith on all of this. But perhaps, the power of Platform Equinix is best seen through the eyes of a customer. So let me wrap my intro here. And before you hear from Sara, I want you to hear from a customer and a partner who's tapping into this power, a company that is truly one of the driving forces in today's digital landscape and a vocal advocate for Equinix.

I have some exciting news to talk about. The world of computing is changing and accelerating. The confluence of cloud computing, NVIDIA-accelerated computing and AI has turbocharged the pace. Cloud gives companies instant computing infrastructure, NVIDIA-accelerated computing and deep learning ignited modern AI, the most powerful technology force of our time. AI learns from data to detect, perceive, predict and automate tasks at incredible speed and scale. AI allows companies to create seemingly magical services like conversational service bots, lightning-fast fraud detection, accurate retail checkouts and recommenders for online shopping. Most companies doing this are Internet companies or start-ups using their cloud, because developing AI requires complex, high-performance computing infrastructure and software. NVIDIA's technologies in every cloud empowers these services. Cloud computing is an amazing invention, yet many industry use cases need a private cloud solution. Data gravity is the fundamental concern. Companies have obstacles like needing their computing close to the data to react quickly, or keeping data transit costs down, or because [ of ] data privacy, lack of data ownership or sovereignty concerns. Many companies want a hybrid cloud solution for agility, cost management and performance. We partnered with Equinix to solve the challenge of delivering AI infrastructure with connectivity, security and proximity to every enterprise around the globe. With Equinix, we're able to deliver turnkey, state-of-the art, edge to cloud, AI computing infrastructure that will integrate seamlessly into our customers' own infrastructure regardless of where it is. Together with our combined OEM partner ecosystem, we uniquely solve this problem. We're combining the power of NVIDIA AI with the global reach and ecosystem access of Equinix to unlock the power of AI for the masses. Yesterday, we announced the NVIDIA AI LaunchPad program with Equinix, along with leading service OEMs, to give the world's enterprises instant AI infrastructure. We're pre-installing AI launchpad systems around the world built on optimally configured, cloud-native enterprise IT ready, secure AI computers that are ready to run. AI LaunchPad will cover the full scale of AI from development to deployment. It's an end-to-end platform to speed the adoption of enterprise AI, starting with our DGX SuperPOD for building the most complex AI, like natural language processing or autonomous systems, to EGX servers for more mainstream AI development as well as deployment at the edge. And we're pairing this infrastructure with our innovation in AI workflow management software. Base Command is a state-of-the-art AI R&D management platform, while Fleet Command simplifies the secure deployment of production AI anywhere, from cloud to edge. Our partnership with Equinix on AI LaunchPad ensures that all enterprise customers can immediately access scalable systems and access instant AI infrastructure in a cloud-like consumption model. With Equinix's global scale, data gets processed closer to the creation source and it's easy to harness data from multiple sources -- across clouds, private data centers and data brokers -- to quickly generate the insights and intelligence needed. The systems are built with industry-standard components from our world-leading IT OEM partners. And once ready to scale, customers can purchase their standard configurations directly from OEMs, and Equinix will scale it up and out in their world-class data centers, spanning 60-plus metros in 26 countries across 5 continents. AI is revolutionizing every industry. Every company will offer products and services powered by AI. With NVIDIA AI LaunchPad and our partnership with Equinix, the world's leading digital infrastructure company, we are democratizing and launching AI for the world's enterprise.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chief Product Officer, Sara Baack.

Hello, everybody. Well, wasn't that exciting to hear Jensen talk about everything that NVIDIA is doing to enable AI on Platform Equinix? And I don't know if it was just me, but I also spent a little time wondering if I could ever pull off a leather jacket like he can. So my coolness deficiency notwithstanding, I'm actually excited to follow Jensen, because I'm here to talk about our platform as well. Our platform is central to our strategy as the world's digital infrastructure company, a platform that's more than just a collection of real estate locations or products, but a portfolio of foundational capabilities that are more and more digitally and seamlessly consumable, a platform that customers and partners like NVIDIA can leverage and build on top of. So my objective today is to share with you how our ongoing investments are helping customers future-proof on our platform and how that translates to value for the company and its shareholders. But before I dig in, I think we need to start with who we're doing this for, our customers. Our customers are at our core, and therefore, they're at the core of our agenda. It's customer-driven, and it's about making Equinix the best place to build hybrid multi-cloud architectures. And that means we have to expand our relevance to customers regardless of what direction they're coming from, from private into public or from public into private. So cloud adopters, who traditionally have been building on-premise, have prioritized technology opinion, security and control, but they're beginning to adopt the public cloud for the agility, speed and OpEx model it provides. On the other hand, we have cloud natives, and they've cared about speed and a software consumption model from the outset. But now they're coming part way out of cloud for the control, performance and cost efficiencies at scale that they can enjoy. And so the reality is the customers want the best of both worlds, both the physical and the virtual worlds, and Equinix is the place where these come together and meet. And therefore our job, our innovation focus is to make sure that hybrid cloud works better at Equinix than anywhere else and to enable our customers to access the durable and superlative sources of value that we have at Equinix, our amazing global reach, our tremendous ecosystems, our broad interconnection portfolio and our trusted reliability in the methods and form factors that work best for them. We see a future where customers can assemble infrastructure in minutes, on demand anywhere in the world from an ecosystem of providers. That's the future that we're building for. And to catalyze that future, we're creating foundational infrastructure in a choice of physical or virtual form factors to deploy across our platform. We're delivering these through software. We're making their consumption self-service and on demand to accelerate speed and agility. And we're doing all of this to do what we've always done best, which is to power interconnected ecosystems, enabling digital leaders to easily transact together and to create and consume value on the platform. Said simply, the mantra we use internally is physical infrastructure at software speed. So we're translating and activating this mantra across 3 key foundational infrastructure categories, or pieces of our product portfolio, if you will. So on the left, you see our data center business, which is an incredibly powerful franchise, a broad capability, our historic legacy, but it's also a substrate for so much more. In the center, we have interconnection services, and this is the glue that fuels our unparalleled ecosystems, Fabric being a key example that Charles already mentioned. And on the far right, you see our newest category, digital infrastructure services. We have been busy here building new virtual consumption experiences for physical infrastructure components across compute, networking and storage. And so across this entire portfolio, we're innovating across the portfolio, both to amplify and animate our existing advantages for customers. So I want to drill into each of these categories a little bit more today. So starting with data centers. Charles already talked about how we are extending our advantages through new geographies here as well as xScale to complement our retail business. But what you may not know is that other sources of innovation are bound in this category as well. We are targeting new efficiencies and a more digital customer experience. Equinix is doing its own digital transformation, if you will. And that innovation spans 3 themes. The first is scalability. And this is about accelerating our efficiency and responsiveness as customers work in the data center or our IBX engineering teams work on their behalf. The second category is digital agility, and this is focused on enabling a fully digital engagement model for customers to make doing and managing their colo business with Equinix simple and easy. And finally, sustainability, which is simply about making Equinix the greenest place to operate. It's amazing to be so close to our 100% target for clean and renewable energy use, and we're pushing forward with our 2030 climate neutral target. So all of these themes are focused on growing our industry leadership by scaling the business and delighting the customers at the same time. And I know what you care about is the payoff for Equinix and the shareholders from this work. Well, the more digital transactions we can enable on our portal, the more customers can self-serve, translating to faster outcomes for them and efficiencies for us. We've been digitizing our operational tooling through machine learning and AI, which is helping to reduce PUE even as we expand into difficult power markets, and drive increased power revenue at the same time. And we're now seeing green shoots from our recent process automation, with our operational headcount productivity improving across our stabilized asset footprint. So the bottom line in our data center business is that these investments translate to faster service for customers and operating leverage for Equinix. Let's talk about our next category, interconnection. Interconnection is the secret sauce in our business, and I think we do it better than anyone, and so we've been hard at work here across 3 themes as well. The first is footprint, and this is ensuring that we make our broad interconnection portfolio as geographically ubiquitous as our data center business is. The second theme is functions. This is focused on expanding the network service elements that we can provide to the customer. A really good example of this is the cloud-based network time service that customer -- we just launched this, let's see, a couple of months ago -- that customers use to globally synchronize their computer infrastructure. And we'll be adding other functions for cloud-oriented buyers as we go, in the realm of networking. And then the third category of innovation is features, and this is really aimed at turbocharging interconnection across our ecosystems, through things like automated discovery tools that help partners find and reach each other digitally; and in particular, deep technology integration with partners and suppliers on Equinix Fabric. So I want to talk a little bit more about Equinix Fabric with you because as the world evolves from physical to virtual, as Charles, I think, mentioned, Fabric will be serving as our flagship interconnection engine. And we've been steadily evolving this platform from what was a localized cloud on-ramp to a global services Fabric. We've greatly expanded the footprint, almost doubling the geographic footprint since the last time we stood before you at Analyst Day 2018. And with technology development and partner integration, Fabric is becoming the mechanism to make business composable, to help customers integrate services and functions together to operate at the edge. I think the best way to kind of bring this to life is to talk about a customer example. So this customer, this client is a Fortune 500 financial data analytics company, and they are deployed with Equinix physically or virtually in 6, about to be 8, markets. And like most customers, they started out purchasing colocation. And like most customers, their first use case on Fabric was accessing the key hyperscalers that they use privately and securely. And eventually, they began to realize that, that performance and efficiency isn't just limited to IaaS, and so they began to tap into the wide portfolio of SaaS capabilities and vendors available on Fabric. And then they began linking together their own physical deployments in the United States, with the intent to use Fabric as an integrated part of their backbone. Following that, with a vision for simplicity and a virtual mandate from the technology leadership at this company, they began globally tying together their international branch locations, with SD-WAN services from Fortinet purchased through our network edge platform. Then they connect all of that to their Verizon enterprise network backbone all over Fabric. This robust example and, in fact, the graphic that we're looking at here, only covers a small subset of the services that can be consumed on Fabric and the use cases that can be solved. So let's come back to the business payoff here. Certainly, we've seen a big step-up in Fabric adoption in participants, yes, but it's the virtual connections those participants are creating that's adding a multiple of growth to the business at the moment. We've also seen increasing unit revenues because as customers size up their bandwidth and they expand their destinations, our revenue per Fabric deployment grows significantly. Interconnection overall drives better stand-alone colo yield. And so what I mean by that is the more interconnected a customer is at Equinix, the higher price yield we earn on just the space and power purchased by the customer. And churn is also correlated to interconnection, inversely so. The more interconnection customers have of any kind, of any flavor, the stickier they are. But customer -- but in particular, customer deployments with Fabric included have retention rates 3x higher than our base. So the bottom line is that our interconnection investments and innovation translate to a powerful network effect for the company and a flywheel for future revenue and margin growth. Okay. Let's move on to our newest category, digital infrastructure services. So think of this category as being focused on cloudifying the colo deployment experience. And we do that by supplying basic building blocks across compute, network and storage, and then we software-enable their delivery. Because ultimately, the jobs customers are trying to accomplish here at Equinix aren't changing, but the way they want to accomplish those jobs and the way they want to consume infrastructure to do so is, and so this portfolio is about helping customers consume our platform value more easily. Three themes here as well. You get that I have a pattern here. And also, I love alliteration. The first is presence. This is about deploying these building blocks across our geographies so that customers can access these capabilities across our footprint. Our second innovation theme is partners. In this part of our portfolio, we are doing some deep integration with branded vendor partners. So that even though a customer is purchasing our branded service, they are still able to rely on the specialized technology leaders that they trust, names like Cisco, Palo Alto, VMware, Pure Storage, just to name a small few. And the last innovation theme is programmability, offering all of the necessary digital interfaces, consoles and APIs to consume and manage these building blocks easily. So I want to explain for a minute how all of those virtual infrastructure components can come together to allow a customer to build a fully virtual colo deployment. So in a traditional buy, build and manage model, the customer creates a physical deployment by purchasing a colo cabinet or cage, and then they work to plan and order their physical gear. They ship and receive that gear. They install it. They test it. They network it together. They activate it. In this model, the customer does all of the stitching together, all of the management, all of the troubleshooting. In a virtual deployment, which is really focused on access and assembly, customers do all of that with keystrokes and buttons. They're able to set up generalized compute with Equinix Metal, which provides and automates single, dedicated tenant hardware that customers provision, network, and activate with keystrokes. They can use that same programmable interface to access dedicated branded storage, first from Pure Storage, but other partners are coming. And then they support networking to others to their ecosystem through routing, firewall and SD-WAN services that they can purchase from Equinix through our VNF platform called Network Edge. So in this virtual deployment, the customer is accomplishing the same sources of value, but they're consuming them on demand in an OpEx manner, and that dramatically changes speed and agility. So let's talk about another customer example, which I think will help bring this home. This client is a Fortune 100 wholesale distribution company. They already had a physical deployment built with us in the U.S. across a number of locations to access clouds, to manage their network, to locate certain proximate applications. Then they made some acquisitions in new regions, and that was the spark for exploring a more asset-light way to tie into clouds in those local markets, to begin network integration with these acquisitions, but to still apply security and policy from the center. So in a matter of days, this customer designed and built the equivalent of their physical hubs in London and Amsterdam using Metal and Network Edge. They used Fabric to access local clouds and networks, and then they connected that back all together across Fabric as well. I think this customer "captures the sentiment perfectly" when the customer tells us that we built this infrastructure with Equinix sitting on the couch in a T-shirt and shorts. So this is the kind of agility that helps long-standing customers like this one digitally transform, and it also makes Platform Equinix addressable to new, born-in-the-cloud customers as well. So once again, let's come back to the business payoff. And here, it's about revenue and ROIC. Because while small, our digital infrastructure services are growing 5x faster than our base, and the pandemic aftermath is only accelerating the appetite to consume in this way. Let's consider things from a customer use case point of view. When a customer chooses the virtual deployment I just described using Metal, Network Edge storage and such instead of a physical colocation deployment with their own infrastructure provided, that results in over twice the spend with Equinix. That's because we're providing more of the solution elements and we're solving many of the physical deployment and management challenges for the -- on the customer's behalf. This expands both our wallet share and our addressable market opportunity. And further, because we can dense up individual customer deployments into the same cabinets and cages, that even amplifies further the revenue yields on the data center platform. So the bottom line for digital infrastructure services is that these improve our revenue growth prospects, they create a TAM expansion engine for Equinix, and they do all of that at comparable or better ROIC than the core. So I've covered quite a bit in a short amount of time. So that's a rarity for me, as some people will probably tell you. So I want to just reinforce 4 things today. The first, delivering distributed global access to digital ecosystems has been the core mission of Equinix, and it's a mission that endures in our innovation agenda. And that's because the need for this durable distinctive value is only amplified today, both for cloud adopters and for cloud-natives. And so we're creating services that deliver our same source of value in new ways that are on-demand, that are as-a-service and much more tightly integrated with partners. And the result for shareholders is a financial profile that provides an expanding TAM, new wallet share opportunities, a higher customer lifetime value and attractive returns. So I'm grateful to be a part of this team, and I'm super passionate about helping to fulfill this mission, which I hope you can tell. Thank you so much for your time this morning, and enjoy the rest of the program. [Presentation]

Please welcome Chief Customer and Revenue Officer, Karl Strohmeyer.

Welcome. I'm Karl Strohmeyer. I'm in charge of our go-to-market efforts here at the company. As you heard from Sara and Charles, who did an incredible job of articulating that our opportunity is large, and our need is now. Customers need what we're -- our capability and they need it today. And we're pursuing this strategy through scaling our business, extending our reach and innovating. Critical to all of it is ensuring that we're delivering our message and our value to as many digital leaders as we possibly can. And of course, we have a direct go-to-market strategy, but we also have an indirect strategy through our channel. In addition -- and so I'm pleased to say, by the way, from a channel perspective, that in any one quarter, our contribution is anywhere from 30% to 35% of our bookings. And 60% of these bookings come from resellers: partners who take our products, bundle them with theirs and deliver complete solutions to end customers. We know these solutions are sticky, and we know that they grow faster on the platform. Today, we have the distinct pleasure of hosting one of our largest partners in the Asia-Pacific region, Telstra. Oliver Camplin-Warner, who is the CEO of Telstra International, is coming here to discuss with us why they chose Equinix, what they've done or what we've done together as 2 companies, and most importantly where we're going to take this going forward. So please, a warm welcome, if you could, and you are live for Oliver. Thank you. Oliver, welcome.

Hey, Karl. Hi, everyone. Good to see you, too. Looking very sharp.

Well, thank you. I think as many people don't realize, you are in Hong Kong right now. Is that correct?

That is correct. It's a little bit early.

Yes.

But I'm good. I've had 2 coffees. I've had my second shave of the day as well, which is a little bit weird.

That's impressive.

So I'm feeling good.

Yes. So if anybody was ever to doubt the commitment of the partnership, I think you showing up at midnight for this presentation will put an exclamation point on it. So thank you. To get things started, Oliver, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and then what it is that you do at Telstra?

Yes, I would love to. Hey, you probably have guessed by now, this is my accent, that I'm English, grew up in London before meeting my beautiful Australian wife and making them move to Australia. And we have 2 stunning children, Florence and Felix. Clearly, I'm a little biased, but I'm a sports nut, a condition of marriage that my second team is now of course Australia. What else can I share? I'm a really bad runner, a really bad runner, but really nothing gives me more energy. So I guess that's a little bit about me on a personal front, a little bit about my family, team Camplin-Warner. Work-wise, I'm not going into too much detail, Karl, because I think the guys have got my bio, but a quick summary. I started my career with IBM in London, where I had a variety of roles over an 11-year period or so. Then when I moved to Australia with Alisa and my family, I moved to the mighty Telstra, where I've been for the last 10 years. And here, I've held a variety of roles, I've been lucky enough to hold a variety of roles, started off looking after our field technicians across the whole of Aus. And I've led the largest segment of our enterprise business in Australia, and now I have the absolute honor of leading our international business around the world.

Wow, fancy, it's a pleasure to have you. And can you tell us a little bit about Telstra?

Of course. Karl, I want to go [ to Australia ] straight away. I'm sorry to do this to you from the get-go. But I just wanted to say, before I go there, a massive congratulations on Equinix being named to the Fortune 500 for the first time. I read the news, whatever it was, a few weeks back. And I was just so, so excited and happy for you. It really is a huge achievement, and you should all be very, very proud. So on behalf of team international, Telstra family, a massive congratulations.

Thank you very much.

Telstra. Now hopefully, most of you know all about Telstra, but for those of you who don't, we're a global telecommunications company that has been around for over a century now. In our founding country of Australia, we're the leading provider of mobiles, all things 5G, broadband Internet for consumer and small businesses and telco and technology services for enterprise and government customers. Internationally, and it's easy for me to say this, but we definitely hold our own, too. We operate in more than 20 countries around the world, working with the big global enterprise customers, wholesale customers and then OTT customers as well. We're a $2 billion business, who is a very competitive challenger in international markets. The sweet spot really has been connecting these international businesses to Asia and Asia to the world, kind of what we're doing right now. But we do this through our incredible global subsea cable network, and we're proud to have the largest subsea cable network in the Asia Pacific region. What does that mean in simple English, Karl? It basically means that we have over 400,000 kilometers worth of cable on the ocean floor. Pretty cool, something we're pretty proud of. About 1/3 of Internet traffic in Asia -- there's a lot of internet traffic in Asia, trust me -- runs on our network. And we carry more traffic from the U.S. to Asia than anyone else. I won't go on for too much longer, but there's a couple of other things. We're also one of the largest SD-WAN providers in APAC and the #1 [ for in ] telco in some of the hardest places to do business in Asia. And finally, a couple of months ago, Gartner ranked us third in its Global Critical Capabilities for Network Services Report. And that was, I guess, our proud moment, sort of reading the press, that was our proud moment for the quarter. So let me leave it there, Karl, because otherwise, I'll just pick up.

Well, congratulations on that result, and it's a great reminder as to why we're partners. To that end, can you tell us a little bit of why you've chosen Equinix to be a partner with?

Yes, would love to. Look, I think in our industry, the term partner, Karl, gets sort of bound around and turned around quite a lot. For me, we have many, many partners, but we really do have a far fewer number of strategic partners, probably just a handful, and that's how I would describe our relationship with Equinix. As a strategic partner, we now share -- and I know we've spoken about this, we're pretty kind of proud of it ourselves, but between the 2 of us, we have now over 240 joint customers from around the world. So there's probably 4 things that set Equinix apart and what makes you a really great choice for us to partner with, and let me just go through those. So first up, the breadth of your locations across the globe really does help support Telstra to reach our global customers no matter where they are, including in some of those emerging markets. Secondly, your sites have amazing cloud connectivity to key players such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google, that our customers use to run their applications day in and day out. Not only connectivity to the cloud, but also connectivity between sites and customers. Third, I'd say, you just continue to demonstrate investment in growing your network location, something that we just need, your capabilities and your offerings. You don't let up, and that's just something we really look for in a strategic partner. And your quality of delivery is just second to none. Last, but by no means least, and you know me, I'm pretty proud about this one. But when I think about strategic partners, if the companies aren't aligned on culture and purpose, then it's never really going to get to the highest level. And I love your purpose and culture even as just listening the last hour or so. So let me just sort of touch on purpose for a minute, if that's okay, Karl.

Go ahead.

As something that drives us as an organization, Telstra's purpose is to build a connected future so everyone can thrive. One of my favorite stories, and it's a quick one, it was I was traveling home one day from the office here in Hong Kong, and I jumped on the bus. I do get the bus home. It's #40 just in case anyone's doubting me. I took my phone out to call my wife, Alisa, and then someone sat next to me and grabbed their phone out as well. Nothing out of the ordinary. She then placed the phone on her lap, [ fired up for a ] video call. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. There was one lady in her kitchen stirring a bowl, one lady sitting on the sofa behind. And then there was just this magical moment where she started to sign. And I'm even telling the story now, my sort of hair stand up on my arms. It was just this magical moment where she was just having a very natural conversation, just like I was with my wife. And it kind of made me think, 10 years ago, that lady wouldn't have been able to communicate that easily. She would have gotten on the bus and wouldn't have been able to have that kind of beautiful interaction. Connections like that are enabled using our beautiful international network, combined with that of our partners, and while we provide wildly more complex technical solutions than that, it's a story that I keep front of mind when I think about our purpose. We're building innovations to help people connect. And as an industry, Karl, I just think that sometimes we forget that incredible impact, the incredible impact that Equinix, that Telstra has day in, day out. We should never lose sight of that. And that kind of connection that we have, I think, really helps our partnership.

That's a really impressive reminder and reflecting on the partnership like that. Thank you. When we think about partners around the world, there's generally 4 things that -- or 4 ingredients that need to exist in order for those to be successful. And the first is a joint strategic value and a vision that we see that's united. And coming together, we can bring more value. And included in that is the executive commitment on both sides. The second is culture and values. Do we share them and the purpose? And do we -- and at our core is customer centricity, as an example. Is it as important to our customers and our partners as it is to us? And then the offer in products. Do we have -- is there synergy around the integration of those products to create bigger offers for customers? And then last but certainly not least is, can we engage the joint selling machine in geography in market together to go prosecute that strategy? And all of those things are -- exist in spades with the Telstra relationship. Now we work with Telstra as both a partner and a customer, and I know Telstra has a lot of strategic initiatives. Can you tell us a little bit about how Equinix is helping Telstra as a customer?

Yes, for sure, Karl. I'd love to. I'll probably keep this one pretty short and sweet because it's an easy one to answer. We are a happy customer. Look, I did my research, as you would expect. I phoned around all parts of the organization, and pretty much every single person I spoke to are real supporters and advocates, in NPS terms, of Team Equinix. We have many parts of our business talk on a regular basis, and just that consistent feedback I get is positive. Across the board, I'd say the level of customer service we get is very strongly -- you spoke just then about that executive engagement. It is there. It really is strong. You talk our language as well. The feedback I've got from the team is that you understand telco, of course, you understand Telstra. So we have that kind of connection straightaway, that relevancy. I love the fact that we focus on win-win opportunities as well, and just to sort of -- maybe just bring to life that a little. Just think about some of the co-investment products, Karl, we've had in place over sort of recent years, it just really has set us up as we've then sort of moved forward together. So in summary I'd say yes, very happy customer and overwhelming positive feedback from the team.

Thank you, Oliver. We appreciate you sharing that because the team is listening. So that goes a long way. As a partner, we've got many wins, and you articulated the stat of over 240, which is just incredibly impressive. And one of the ones that just jumps out to me as you'll think about that list is what we did together with Genomics. And Genomics is, together we're enabling researchers across the U.K. to sequence and mine the human genome to address current and future genetic conditions by helping them quickly and securely share immense amount of data between their own facilities and that of their academic partners. And using Equinix data center and interconnection services along with Telstra Purple services, we've delivered a solution to them. So that one speaks to me. Are there any examples that you want to share?

I love that one, Karl. I mean out of the 240, one of my favorites without doubt and especially given everything the world is facing at the moment. Look, if I think about the remaining 239, you're probably sitting there thinking, he's going to pick one of the big banks or one of the big supermarket chains and go with one of those really big logos, but I'm going to take a slightly different approach. And I'm going to talk about a smaller, purpose-driven organization called the Salvation Army in Australia, because this is the sort of work, you're probably guessing by now everyone, that I feel sort of most proud about. The Salvation Army in Australia is a charitable organization that has deep roots in Aus, helping people in the community who are experiencing hardship. Equinix and Telstra worked with the Salvation Army over an 18-month period to help them implement a multi-cloud and network consolidation strategy to improve efficiency and collaboration across Australia's 8 states and territories. The project delivered a standardized national IT platform, bringing together disconnected and siloed infrastructure to help enhance collaboration across this beautiful organization, with much more reliable video conferencing, deliver enhanced security and just uptime of key IT applications. And most importantly, the platform we've delivered, Karl, you and I -- or the team, not only you and I, but the platform that the team delivered really is supporting them now in new areas such as Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. Equinix was able to work directly with Telstra on behalf the Salvation Army, which made the whole project hassle-free so they can focus on the important work they do day in, day out in the community. It's just so rewarding to know that through this solution, we're supporting such a great organization that supports so many people in Australia who unfortunately don't have anyone else to turn to. Of course, we also work with some really large organizations, too. So I'm just going to go for one other, Karl, if we've got time, and that is Komatsu. Komatsu is one of the largest manufacturers of earthmoving and mining equipment globally, and we've been working with Komatsu for about 20 years now, and most recently, delivering cloud solutions and working with them to transition to hybrid cloud. Cloud and network infrastructure are critical to supporting mining equipment and business-critical applications that just transmit so much data, huge volumes of data in real time. Komatsu is an innovative adapter of technology, and we've actually just announced the next step in their technology evolution, which is an agreement for us to transition Komatsu to a consumption-based hybrid cloud supported by hyperconverged infrastructure and SD-WAN technology. From the early days of Komatsu's hybrid cloud adoption, Equinix has been such an important element of the solution. The ability for Equinix to easily interconnect customers' equipment directly to the public cloud is a huge [ step ] to help support companies like Komatsu migrate to the hybrid cloud. The new solution we delivered together is expected to improve control and visibility across the whole of Komatsu's network and infrastructure and help Komatsu to continue to be a true, true leader in technology innovation. Pretty cool story, I think.

Yes. Those are great stories, and I love how you led with the purpose of Salvation Army. As investors have a tendency to do to myself and others, there's always one last question, which is, is there anything else you would like to share that you think we should know?

Yes.

Well, how about this? How about this? How about before we go there, where should we take the relationship from here?

Throwing different questions at me here. We spoke about the 240 a earlier. I recommend -- why don't we just double it? Let's go 480 or just round up to 500. How does that sound?

Sounds brilliant to me, sounds brilliant.

Pretty cool, right? But I think without doubt, Karl, the opportunities for us out there are just -- they are limitless, right? I mean all corners of the world, the coverages that you have, coverages we have, there are just so many opportunities. And I think we should just go harder and we should just look to double. I don't see any limit there at all. I think we've got an opportunity to maybe even sort of strengthen some of our connections around each other's portfolios. We're having a conversation right now around Metal, what role that could potentially play. We're growing our enterprise business. So I'd love you to sort of help support us in that as we look to expand part of our portfolio. So I think lots and lots of opportunities. To your second question, I'd say -- man, I'm going off [ piece ] again. I'm sorry, but I'm going to go with a bit of public appreciation. I mean you spoke about the team a little bit earlier, but I'm going through a little bit of public appreciation and a smidge of embarrassment, I think, to that but also a little bit of a cheeky ambition just sort of as I think it through. So in terms of embarrassment, I'd just like to thank, Karl, the Equinix team that we work with day in, day out: Rob Ironmonger, he owns the relationship and is a superstar; Jeremy Deutsch, the [ exempt ] owner, just again, gives us so much value; and then Diarmid Massey, who's just been with us for a period of time now; and I know there are many others as well. But our heartfelt thank you to the Equinix team for working so closely with us and building up what is such an important partnership. The cheeky ambition just to close, and I know we're out of time, is just around this partnership. We know how important it is to you. We treasure it greatly. But we know, at the same time, we're not your #1 partner. And I'd love to be back here in a year or 2 years' time and say, "Telstra International, Telstra Australia, we are your #1 partner." So that would be my final closing, cheeky.

I love the goal, #1 and 500 customers, I think we should get after it. Well, look, I really want to thank you, Oliver, especially for the time, the time that you're doing this and the time commitment to prepare for this, but most importantly, the partnership. We have such a bright future between both organizations. And the energy, the value, the purpose are all there. And I want to extend a thank you to your entire team for all of the work that they do to support us. And as you highlighted, the Equinix value proposition is distinct. Our partners and resellers provide a unique opportunity to share that value proposition and create solutions to complex problems at scale. Doing so will only further the momentum of the business, provide opportunities to extend the platform and innovate to solve business and world challenges. So on behalf of Equinix, on behalf of Telstra, I just want to thank you for listening today. It's been a pleasure, and hopefully, I get to see you on a normal Hong Kong time in Hong Kong soon. Thank you.

Maybe lunch, let's go for lunch.

Lunch sounds perfect.

That'll be good.

Thank you, Oliver. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks, Karl. Take care. Stay safe.

Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy a short break. Our program will resume in 15 minutes. [Break]

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Chief Financial officer, Keith Taylor.

Great. Welcome back, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the sessions that we had this morning so far. Charles and Sara, Karl and our customer, Oliver from Telstra. What you probably could tell by the discussion, it's a lot about growth. It's a lot about expanding our platform. What I'm going to do is take it just one step further. I'm really going to talk about long-term durable value that we can create for our shareholders. And so what I'd like to do is that, thankfully, it starts with bookings, and bookings is a precedent to effectively our revenues. At some point, we're going to go all the way when we talk about our themes, our key takeaways, we're going to go all the way to culture. Culture is something that we have inside Equinix. And then there's everything in between, from accelerating demand, value creation and innovation, but I want to talk a little bit about culture. It's again something we have at Equinix, and we've had it for the last 20 years. It's not something that you can buy, it's not something you can prescribe. You create it. It is one of those quantifiable -- unquantifiable differences that we have relative to anybody else in our space. And it starts at the top and it permeates its way into the organization, but as I said, it does start with bookings. And by the time we go through all of the key takeaways and themes today, one of the things I want you to walk away with is that we are focused on long-term value creation for our shareholders. And they will be best represented in our bookings volume, and our customer relationships, and ultimately the value that we can deliver on a per share basis. So let's talk about bookings. It's a precedent to revenue, of course. And boy, have we had bookings. The chart that I have, I put up, it really looks back to 2016, and effectively tells you that our bookings have been up 50% -- almost 50% over that time period. And I'm not talking about swing for the fence type of bookings that make somebody's quarter or perhaps their year. I'm talking about those bookings, that 4,000 transactions we did with 3,000 of our customers last quarter. That's the type of bookings I'm talking about. That was up 50% since 2016. So great value that we create with those booking activities. Now some of that booking does come from channel. More than 30% of our booking activity is channel-based. The other thing that I wanted to share with you is, we have net positive pricing actions. You've heard us say it on almost every single earnings call that we've had, and that creates long-term shareholder value for you. It's a living and breathing organism. And as each quarter goes by, we have net positive pricing actions, that creates long-term value. You're not seeing those gap downs that others have had to suffer through. We have a different business model. And our churn, 2% to 2.5% per quarter, we're focused on that as well. Again, our model is different, so we do have more churn. But the reality is, we're putting energy behind our churn mitigation efforts, or maybe said differently, our revenue retention initiatives. And we want to get it to more the bottom end of our 2% to 2.5% range. And then lastly, we have plenty of bookings that are sitting in our backlog, which will eventually be installed and built. But let me take you to revenues. The thing that I love to highlight on this chart, and it's not lost on many of you, I'm sure, 73 straight quarters of topline revenue growth. Back in January, we did our annual sales kickoff, and I said this to our sales force, I said, 73 quarters, that's over 18 years. And I would ask you to think about what were you doing 18 years ago. And from that point through our last quarter, we've had sequential topline revenue growth. Since 2015, our business has more than doubled. We have dollar growth rates and revenue that's -- over a year-over-year basis that is larger than some of our competitors. Revenue for the largest region is the Americas, 45% of our revenues come from the Americas. If I take out Canada and Brazil, it's 42%. As we said on the last earnings call, the Americas region is going to grow 6% or maybe even greater over the next 3 quarters, setting ourselves up nicely for 2022. It's also our most profitable region. And so we're going to continue to enjoy strong revenue growth for the foreseeable future. Now as I said, it was 3 years ago since we last stood up on the stage with you, and we told you what we thought we could do. We have a track record of delivering on what we say we're going to do. The revenues are effectively on top of what we told you. AFFO per share -- our AFFO and AFFO per share are ahead of what we told you, largely because of strong operating performance, but also because we had a much more favorable refinancing environment than I and maybe any of us ever anticipated. And our CapEx is consistent with our estimates. Although it has shifted. We have put more money to work -- since I was on the stage 3 years ago, more money to work in digital infrastructure services. We want to invest in Fabric. We want to invest in Edge. We want to invest in Metal. And the other one, other change that you probably have seen is we have more capital that's on our balance sheet, at least in a transitory way or transitory way related to xScale, but that then gets moved over to the JV when we contribute those assets to the joint ventures. But overall, we deliver against what we say we're going to do. So let me also talk about our acquisitions. So it's not just about delivering on our operating performance. When we think about how do we create equity value, we also think about our acquisitions. And we've had 27-plus acquisitions over our lifetime. But if I just look back at the last 7 that we have done, we've created immense equity value. But what's more important, we've enhanced our interconnection. It's up 60%. We have more new markets, 20 new markets, up 54%. And we're contributing more value, more dollars to the business with these acquisitions. In fact, let me tell you a little bit about the equity value that we've created. Again, looking at those last 7 alone, in addition to the capital that we have spent on acquiring those assets, we have created $5 billion more equity value for our shareholders. And putting that in perspective, it's over $50 a share. Our acquisitions are real. We try and create long-term strategic value for our shareholders when we do that, and it extends and scales our platform. Talking about platform, as I said, we're in 60-plus markets around the globe. This chart that we put up for you here today gives you a sense of the size of the market, size of the bubble determines the amount of dollars we generate in revenue in that market. The color coding is effectively telling you where the headquarter is sourced -- the headquarter of that customer where the revenue is sourced from. As you can tell, there's a lot more dark blue in this slide that tells you that the U.S. or the Americas business is a net exporter to the other 2 regions. And we look forward to the days when the other 2 regions will also be net exporters to their other 2 regions. The bottom line is, we have 16 major metros here. We're going to continue to invest in those major metros. We're going to grow and scale in the majors, but we're also going to focus on the emerging and the other markets. Again, you've heard us say this before, but I do want to repeat it. 90% of our quarterly bookings come from the installed base. Charles said it earlier today, more than 60% of our revenues come from customers who operate in all 3 regions of the world. So we want to continue to invest. We're going to go look for those places where there's cable landing station opportunities, other critical infrastructure, service or aggregation nodes, network nodes. You can see us extend our platform, something that's exceedingly value -- valuable, not only to us, but our customers and you, our shareholders. And when I think about ecosystems, we've talked a lot about delivering against our operating results, delivering against our acquisitions. We're going to extend our platform, but it's also really important to work on our customer relationships. That's the value that we can bring to our customers, developing relationships, creating an environment where they want to be. We're creating an environment where few can be or even want to be, when you think about our competitive landscape. Our value is sitting on an unchangeable foundation. I want to repeat it, an unchangeable foundation of 1,800 networks, and that attracts the cloud on-ramps. And no surprise to you, that drives interconnection. And you saw all the statistics this morning on our interconnection activity, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. But ultimately, that's what the customer is looking for, more interconnections. We do more than the next 10 companies combined -- public companies combined. So an interconnection. Again, it's a measurement of separation. It's a very important part of our business that was referred to as the secret sauce. In many ways, it is. It's the value that we can bring, again to you, our shareholders, but certainly to our customers. And it's focusing on that interconnection, it's taking the right customer, focusing on that customer, putting them in the right IBX because they have the right application. And we want to continue to do that. Interconnection will grow faster than our overall business, and let me give you a perspective. As I said, it will grow faster than the overall business for very good reasons, because we are creating value. Customers want to come to us. We have a differentiated platform. It is different than anybody else out there in our competitive landscape. Current course and speed, the interconnection revenue model this year will range somewhere between $1.1 billion and a $1.2 billion business. So it tells you the scale and size, and it's been growing on a compounded growth rate basis of 17%. So we've done very well through what we believe is 2021, and we think we're positioning ourselves really well for '22 and beyond. Now our balance sheet. It is a strategic asset. Again, it's a point of separation: the financial flexibility and strategic advantage we have relative to anybody else in our space is unparalleled. It's unmatched. And you saw the announcement not that long ago where we received 2 upgrades from 2 of our credit rating agencies to BBB flat. And yes, that was important. We were able to refinance our debt at lower rates than we might otherwise have been able to. But what was really valuable was the fact that they give us 5x leverage. They increased our leverage capacity by 1 turn, and that created immense flexibility for us. So we don't have to fund a lot of our growth in the future necessarily through equity. We can use our cheapest source of capital, which is debt, to fund our growth. In fact, because we had such a successful refinancing effort, in addition to paying back the principal related to our 2 refinancings this year, we raised an incremental $1.3 billion. So it's going to be a great source of our future capital as we continue to grow and scale our business. But also, as I said, our balance sheet is a strategic asset. We do have immense financial flexibility. As you can see here, we're levered 3.7x. We have flexibility. We have immense flexibility with our liquidity position. As it relates to our average borrowing rate, it's the lowest in our space at 1.73x the average through the longest average debt maturity. So we've got tremendous financial flexibility in our business. And when you have a strong balance sheet and you have financial flexibility, it gives you the opportunity to be a real good disciplined allocator of capital. It's your capital. We want to make sure we do a good job. We're not going to grow just for growth's sake, we're going to take the capital and do what we think is right to create long-term shareholder value. Again, we're not shortsighted. We are not shortsighted as a company. And over the last 5 years, we have allocated almost $30 billion of capital, growing and scaling our franchise, but we've also been returning capital to you in the form of a growing cash dividend. You can see over from left to right, there's been an evolution of how the capital is being deployed. And no surprise, again to you, based on what you've heard today, we're going to continue to put more work in investing organically or potentially inorganically, if the need may be, in the business. But we are going to continue to focus on digital infrastructure services, and to a much lesser extent in our balance sheet, on xScale. But we have all the abilities to continue to grow and scale and use the flexibility of our balance sheet. I talk about flexibility, again, we've invested heavily organically in the business. When we talk about growth, earlier on we talked about expanding or extending or innovating, I think about the sort of the horizontal. We're going to grow horizontally, but we're also going to grow vertically. And in this particular chart, you see we have tremendous capacity, and we're going to go optimize that capacity, make sure we fill it up again so its highest and best use, fill up that capacity. You've also seen the number of new and approved builds, but we have a tremendous amount of land capacity as well, whether we sell it to the JV or whether we use it for our own future purposes for development. Again, we're going to optimize our development capacity. Our strategic firepower? Yes, it's unmatched. It really is. Again, I think about what we can do as an organization. We're not going to grow for growth's sake, we're going to use the capital wisely. We're going to create value for you, the shareholder. But what I can tell you is, we have lower leverage. We have more liquidity. We have a lower payout ratio, and it will remain low for an extended period of time. And for every incremental dollar of capital we put to work, we'll get a higher dollar return than anybody else in our space. Another thing I want to make sure, we're not going to recycle assets. That's not our business. Some of you have asked about it before. It's not our business. Our assets are our platform. So there will be no asset recycling. And when I talk about firepower and unmatched, boy are we excited about xScale. Boy, were we excited about that announcement last week with GIC. And now on the $7 billion initiative with GIC, a world-class partner, boy, did we choose right over 32 buildings. And that's not the only JV that we're going to have or set of JVs, we have more JVs coming. And we have another partner that we're going to announce. We have momentum in the xScale business, and it's just beginning. Next year, the xScale franchise could spend upwards -- could -- of $1.7 billion. It's not going to be in our balance sheet, though. Part of what we announced last week is so we could do all that growth inside the joint ventures, funded predominantly from our partner and from the leverage that we have. And by 2025, the xScale franchise could deliver greater than $1 billion of revenue. And we're going to enjoy our pro rata share of that, but we're also going to enjoy the fee structure that comes along with running a platform of that scale and size. Our xScale team have done phenomenal. We're so proud of what they've accomplished so far. In the last earnings call, we announced 3 new buildings, and they're all presold. We've already presold another building this quarter. So we have momentum, and it's exciting to see. But xScale, when I talk about the momentum, it's not just about being able to grow a different business offering, it was also strategically wise is, attaching ourselves to that customer relationship. That's what was exceedingly valuable to us. It was also making sure we maintained the strategic and financial flexibility that is so important so we could take our capital, and we can put it back into retail and digital infrastructure services. That's what was important. Yes, we can grow faster. But putting that on our books, it would reduce the degrees of maneuverability substantially. And I would argue that some of you have already seen what it's done to some of our competitors, public and/or private. The degrees of maneuverability have been reduced. Again, having GIC as our partner, boy, did we choose right. So let me leave you with a thought. At the end of the day, xScale again important, but I want you to know, it will deliver 3% to 5% accretion on the AFFO per share, 3% to 5%. But I also want you to know, none of that's in our current results. Today, we're in the investment phase in the xScale. We're growing it and scaling it. And you're going to see it continue to accelerate, and we'll enjoy 3% to 5% accretion. At current multiples, to give you a perspective, that's another $50 a share of value that we will create. And you've heard from Sara and Charles earlier today, our strategy is real, but it's multifold. It's how do we extend, expand and innovate. And when we think -- when I put this slide up, it's just to give you an example of what we can do in a given market. Not all markets will have this, but when I think about the major metros, and Frankfurt is one of those major metros, we continue to invest and expand and innovate inside that environment. It's a 3-pronged strategy. It's not only retail. It's not only very interconnection-rich environments, it's xScale, and it's all the other services in between. We create value not only for the Frankfurt franchise, but the German franchise, for the region, and quite openly, for the global platform. That is what our 3-pronged strategy is all about, and we're extending our market leadership. Now let me try and put a finer point on AFFO and AFFO per share. Again, 3 years ago, I stood up here and I said, AFFO as a percent of EBITDA would continue to grow in scale for obvious reasons. We knew at the time that we would continue to grow and scale the business, but we also knew as an organization, we'd have to -- would be able to debt refinance our existing debt load. And so we went from 69% AFFO as a percent of EBITDA margin to 79%. That's the estimate for this year, and all of that is the midpoint of guidance. We anticipate, now that the debt refinancing is behind us, by and large, that we'll be able to maintain these rates at or near this level, and that will offset the higher international taxes that will be due, because we are going to grow faster in the international markets where we are not a REIT and therefore we're going to have to pay more taxes. It also will address the dilution associated with our employee stock benefit plans. We believe that we can continue to keep AFFO as a percent of EBITDA at a very high level. So as I start to wind down my presentation today, I know some of you probably -- this is the only slide that you really care about. But for us, I wanted to tell you a few things. First and foremost, as we think about our growth, you heard Charles talk about an expanding market, increasing the TAMs larger than we anticipated, extending our reach and our scale. As we extend and expand and innovate, we know that we're going to focus on continued growth. And so as a company, we're going to commit to 7% to 9% a year outpacing the broader market. We believe that we can grow this business 7% to 9% per year now through 2025 on the top line. That does not assume any incremental acquisitions. Other accelerants potentially could be currency, but put that aside, it can cut both ways. Churn mitigation, maybe we do better than we anticipate. That could be helpful. We're not making any assumptions today about inflation, so 7% to 9%. And as a result, AFFO, we're committing to 7% to 10% AFFO per share growth. And recognizing in 2022 we'll probably be in the bottom half of the range versus the top half of the range, as we start to realize the benefits of our efficiency initiatives. And our cash dividend is now going to grow 8% to 10%, 8% to 10%. So I want to leave you with some thoughts. First, we will continue to execute strongly, and I think there's significant momentum behind the business, even a business of our size. I'm hopeful those -- that 73 quarters of topline revenue growth will continue, and we're an investment-grade rated company. Two, the secular trends are creating immense opportunity for us. And as you heard Charles speak, you heard Sara speak, it's an opportunity that's substantial. And today, we have 400,000 cross-connects and growing. We're reinforcing trends that drive distinctive value to Equinix. We will grow the revenue 7% to 9%. We have a 3-pronged strategy. We're going to continue to invest, invest in xScale, whether it's the capital or the equity we've put into the business, we'll continue to grow in scale and invest across our platform. And that will drive growth and scale. It also gives us leverage ability in our model. And lastly, we're going to deliver durable long-term value to our shareholders. That is committing to 50% EBITDA margins by 2025. Some of that's going to come from gross profit, as you heard Sara speak about earlier today, and some of it will come from our SG&A. But we will grow our EBITDA margin to 50% and AFFO will grow at 7% to 10% per year. So I want to leave you with 4 key metrics: revenue, 7% to 9%; AFFO 7% to 10% per share; cash dividend will grow 8% to 10%; and we will spend in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion of capital a year through 2025, investing in our future growth and scale. So before we go to questions with Charles, I just wanted to take this one last opportunity to thank our #1 rated Investor Relations team with Katrina, Chip and Katie for doing just a job well done. I want to thank our world-class events team for putting all of this together. I'm sure, looking on the other side of the lens, it seems relatively simple, but I can assure you it's tremendously complex. And hopefully, you've enjoyed this, at least these segments so far and more to come. So I want to thank our Events team for a job well done. I also want to thank every single employee. We're not able to stand up here if it wasn't for all the hard work, the effort and commitment that our employees put in to making Equinix that special place, that special company with a very special culture. So I want to thank all of our employees. And then I want to thank you, our investors. You have been great supporters of us over all these years, and I envision that you will continue to be a great supporter for us on a go-forward basis. So thank you. We're now going to have questions.

Welcome to our executive Q&A. As you can tell, we're doing this live. We're very excited to be taking your questions. [Operator Instructions] So with that, let's get started. I had a few pre-submitted questions, and please keep them coming. Our first question is from our RBC analyst, Jon Atkin. Can you walk us through the primary puts and takes that will influence margins over the medium term: operating leverage, geographic factors and so forth?

Sure. Maybe I'll start, you can build on it. So obviously, a key part of it is, we're growing -- we're going to grow the business pretty substantially at the top line over this next several year period. And that gives us a lot of opportunity in the expense below that, between that and the EBITDA line to make inflections in the business. And so -- and I think that will be both at the gross profit line in terms of inflecting cost of revenue, and we talked about some of the opportunities there to improve our PUEs. And Utilities, obviously, is a chunk of that. And then also really starting to tackle the SG&A. And we're -- as I said, we're in an investment cycle in a number of areas. We've identified some of these pieces in the business that we think we can get leverage, and there is opportunities for that. I think you look at things like channel self-service, for example, if we can improve the ability for our channel to bring business in and provision it quickly to customers, I actually think that's an opportunity for us to continue to grow our margins. Customer self-service, if we can continue to improve our ability for our customers to self-serve, that's an inflection point in our business to enhance margins. And then -- and in terms -- also at the cost of revenue line, I think as we -- we're looking at automation. We have a project underway called Jarvis, which is using technology to allow our techs on the ground in the IBXs to be -- more effectively use their time. And Sara actually showed one of the charts that's showing green shoots of that showing up. So I think as we said, we're in the investment phase on the margin side right now, that was why we kind of guided where we did in 2021, but we're on a good track to deliver strong results this year. And I think we're going to be able to see that inflection in margin over the years towards the back half of the planning cycle that we outlined.

Great. Thank you. Our next question is from Goldman Sachs, Brett Feldman. You noted that customer deployments with Equinix Fabric have retention rates that are 3x higher than deployments without. Is there scope to reduce your churn below your historical rate of 2% to 2.5% as more customers use these services?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Brett. What I would say is, there's a little bit of cross correlation on that 3x stat that was on Sara's charts, because obviously, Fabric adoption has tended to be led by these digital leaders that are at the top of our stack in terms of our customers who are already really heavily -- they're -- one, they're very widely deployed geographically; two, they have high levels of interconnection already. And so they are already demonstrating this. So there is a little bit of cross-correlation in that stack. That said, we think there is a level of causation in there as well, and so we're investing in increasing the uptake on Fabric. It's a strategic priority for us. I was just talking to Karl. We have an effort underway called ACT, which I, for the life of me, couldn't remember what clever acronym it was -- it stood for, but it was accelerating connectivity today, which is great. And we have our teams working on and motivated and incented to drive Equinix Fabric. So -- but a shorter answer to your question is, relative to -- is there opportunity for us to continue to improve churn? The short answer is, yes. I would say, right now, we're more comfortable saying, "Hey, we want to really try to strive more towards the low end of our 2% to 2.5%." Obviously, we did that last quarter right at the bottom end of that range. It's obviously a big impact on our business, if we can stay at that bottom end of that range. Over time, is there opportunity to go to below that if we get -- we've always said the most powerful force for impacting churn is the right business to begin with. And I think the teams are doing a great job at that in terms of customer targeting. I think our enhanced service portfolio and being able to get a broader mix of digital services into the mix is going to help us to reduce churn as well. And so I do think there's an opportunity for us longer term to go even lower.

Excellent. Our next question comes from MoffettNathanson, Nick Del Deo. And it's a 2-parter, so get ready. Can you talk a bit about CapEx required to support these services upfront and the refresh maintenance? And how should we think about the OpEx profile? In addition, the second part, do you feel the current base of digital infrastructure service customers is representative of those you'll be adding in the coming years?

Yes. It's -- so I assume he's talking about digital infrastructure services, at least it was mentioned in the second part of that. And there -- the capital profile, there is a little bit more -- there is some capital intensity to these services. If you look at Metal and Network Edge and others, there is some -- both upfront and refresh and maintenance. But I would tell you this, that the ROIC on that, we think is as good or better than our traditional data center services, so -- and the OpEx profile is not dramatically different either. It's different in its nature, but it's not meaningfully different in its overall profile. And so -- and I think in terms of the profile of these services going forward, I think they'll -- we're going to continue to focus at the infrastructure layer, right? And so I think we're not going to go way up stack. We think there's opportunities for us to continue to extend our interconnection portfolio and add features to Fabric to make that continue to be an even more compelling tool for our customers. And then on the digital infrastructure services, candidly, our near-term priority is to scale Metal and Network Edge. And there is some additional opportunities for us out there, and we're going to continue to innovate and expand that portfolio over time, but that's where our real near-term focus is going to be.

Great. Well, let's jump into the guidance. So I had several questions coming in from investors, and I'll consolidate it a bit. So first they're starting with, when you're thinking about the revenue guidance as the 7% to 9% per year, how should we think about digital infrastructure services as a contributor?

Well, yes, certainly, when we first -- let's take this year as an example. Metal in and of itself is, we're targeting $50 million of revenue for this year. We certainly believe that digital infrastructure services are going to grow faster, and over a period of time faster than the overall business. And one of the things I failed to mention when I talked about the 7% to 9%, by the time you get to the long end of the range, we think digital infrastructure services will be a larger contributor to our growth than the traditional business. But overall, we're very excited about, again, the green shoots of opportunity, the investment we're making. And as Charles alluded to, there's -- it is a different profile. We invest differently in Metal, as an example, to allow our customers to scale, but we're optimistic that, that will grow at a much faster rate than the overall business.

Yes. I'd add, as you saw in the presentation that I hope you've experienced over the years, you've been part of this Equinix story, we like to do what we say we're going to do. And so the way I would characterize how we've got it layered into the long-term model that's informed our guidance is, I think we've been appropriately conservative in the ramp of Digital Infrastructure Services in terms of its contribution. Having said that, I think one of the questions we get is, what's going to move you towards the high end or the low end of the range because it's a reasonably meaningful range that we've guided to on the topline side. And I think digital infrastructure services overperforming relative to what I think was a more conservative estimate, is one of those opportunities for our performance over time. But I will also tell you this, we're super excited about the response of our customers to these digital infrastructure services. And I think with Network Edge and Metal, we're seeing a real appetite that really reinforces we think the strategic benefit that we thought we were going to get when we did the Packet acquisition, and the investments that we've made in those services. So we're excited about the road ahead.

Great. Turning a bit to xScale. Our next question comes from Jordan Sadler at KeyBanc. How should we think about the timing of financial impact from the $3.9 billion incremental xScale investments in terms of project completions?

Well, again, we did include in the charts today a pretty good time line on what we think we're going to spend and over what period of time we can generate that revenue. So you've got a pretty good visibility now on what we think is possible. Recognizing it's 32 buildings today, there's more that are on the come, as I said, with more JVs and another partner. And so we'll continue to update you, but suffice it to say, I think you've got sort of all the makings of what it means. If I was to tell you from an influencing perspective on what's going to happen inside the Equinix, I think initially, you're going to see a lot of the nonrecurring fees replaced by the recurring fees. And then, of course, you're going to see a scaling of the xScale business, the JVs themselves, and that will give us equity value below the line. As I said, there are sort of really 6 key trends, revenue trends: Number one, it's the nonrecurring that we get from developing an asset and filling it up. But then we have the asset management fee and the ops fee. Then ultimately, it's the performance of the business that we'll get through below the line. But the sixth one, which I wanted to share with you because I also thought it was important is, as you think about the future, the ability to get outsized returns with promotes, given the investment profile of an xScale asset, again, it will sit outside of Equinix. But to the extent that, that ever gets sold, there is an opportunity for us to even gain more value. But again, maybe coming back and making -- providing you a simpler answer. By 2025, you get a sense that the revenues are really, really ramping. For us, that also means the revenues are ramping, but they're going to alternate. The nonrecurring will be replaced with recurring. And so the implications on AFFO per share will be anywhere between, I think, 2% and 3%. So I refer to the 3% to 5%. I think by 2025, it's a 2% to 3% influence on our results.

Excellent. Our next question comes from Mike Rollins at Citi. How is Equinix looking at the optimal target net debt leverage ratio range over the next 3 to 5 years? Is Equinix in a position to self-fund development with cash flow and debt rather than equity in the future?

Do you want me to take that, or...

Yes.

So I'll take that and Charles will jump in. As I said in sort of my remarks, it's great having just a phenomenal balance sheet. It is a strategic asset to us, and having more flexibility coming from our rating agencies is going to make a difference. And so as I think or as we think about what is the opportunity, we absolutely can use more debt on a go-forward basis than equity capital. We always want to have some level of balance. Part of the reason that we get such a favorable rating from rating agencies is, we've used balance between debt and equity. But the reality is, we can use much more debt. And all you have to do is fast forward over this '21 through '25 time period or a 5-year time period, you realize one more turn of EBITDA can be very substantial. And so it's fair to say that, that's going to be a great source of future capital. Even if there is a rising interest rate environment, it is going to be a cheaper source of capital than our equity, given what we think we can accomplish with the business. So I want to leave you with that. That's important. But also I think it's important to realize that we're not going to lever up just to lever up, we want to make sure that we maintain that strategic and operational flexibility. And having 3.7x leverage as a business is great, but as we go through time, the business is going to continue to scale. And so Mike's comment was really, could you self-fund the business? The simple answer is, pretty darn close to we can almost self-fund it wholly with debt and the cash flow that we generate, while at the same time growing our dividend. So we're in a very, very good position. But I'm not saying that we're going to pop it all the way up to 5x because we want to maintain our strategic flexibility. We're not making any assumptions on M&A today. And again, we want to use our balance sheet both organically and inorganically and see what opportunities present themselves. And if you max out everything too soon, you've lost that flexibility. And again, as I said in some of my prepared remarks, I think some of our competitors have done that to themselves. And we want to maintain our flexibility.

Yes. And I think we'd hope that we're going to get even more flexibility over time on those, right?

Yes.

And I think the dialogue with the rating agencies continues. And we're very pleased to have gotten the extra turn, but there's probably more to be had there.

Great. Let's continue on the balance sheet question. So the next question comes from Tim Horan from Oppenheimer. Are there additional opportunities for more green bond issuances in the future; it's currently a third of total, and help lower the cost of capital?

That's something -- that's one that you should answer.

I promise this was Tim's question. I did not plant it.

Look, I think the opportunities that we've created with our green bonds is substantial, for a number of reasons. Charles alluded to it in his piece today. The value that we bring to the table from an ESG perspective and what we're investing, particularly as we strive to become a carbon-neutral player by 2030. Invest -- taking green bonds, which come at a lower cost of capital, it's really hard, it's hard to put a exact number on it but we estimate anywhere from 5 to 10 basis points of lower cost. It would be great to continue to access green bonds to invest in our green initiatives. And as you know, Katrina and investors, we have a green finance framework that we've done -- that we are using and that we will continue to use to make sure that we are the trailblazer in our industry. So I see it as an opportunity, again if we continue to fund ourselves with predominantly debt, which I think is, at least under current situations would be appropriate, green should be part of it.

Absolutely. And just a quick pitch for a later deep dive, we're covering sustainability as well. So we will talk a lot in depth about our programs in addition to the 4 other topics we're very excited to share with you. So jumping back to xScale, the next question comes from Colby at Cowen. And it's diving a little bit more into the comment around 3 to 5%. So in spending more on xScale, then why is it still just 3 to 5% accretive to AFFO? Can you be a bit more specific on the time frames of when you expect to achieve this, and how dilutive is xScale to AFFO per share in 2021?

I was actually looking at maybe the next question, so you tricked me with that one. Colby, you're asking a very fair question. I think the reality is not fully appreciating the scale and size of these developments. So when we think about the markets that we've highlighted, again 32 buildings across many markets. Some have substantial limitations on our ability to access power. I think of Dublin, I think of Tokyo, and I'm sure there's other markets. But the team is working really hard to figure out exactly over what period of time as we fit into these hyperscalers' supply chain and how we create value. And so because it's not overly dilutive this year we're basically, it's very minimal contribution to our performance this year. But the reason that we're not seeing more value come to the forefront is that the amount of investment, it goes back to the focus areas that Charles alluded to at the beginning part of the year. xScale was one of those focus areas. By doing what we're doing, we're going to create an environment that will have, could have 100 different legal entities. It's so complex to create what we are creating. And because of that we're setting up, I wouldn't say full teams in parallel, but there's teams that are being set up in parallel to make sure that we can go build out all of these megawatts, we can go [ bill ] it, and it takes time for that to happen. And so you are going to realize the benefit. As we go through '21 into '22 you'll start to see the contribution. But I want to be real about it. In the end, 2025 in this business and because the large hyperscalers don't necessarily install all at once, it sort of grows and scales, that it's not -- sometimes it's not immediate gratification, you get to enjoy it over a period of time. And that's why I said 2 to 3 is what I feel is reasonable. But we'll continue to update you as we go through this journey. And I think it is going to be a great journey, with xScale adding immense value to our overall platform. Did you want to add...

No, I was just going to say that relative to the last part of that, which was how dilutive is it in '21, it's pretty modest in terms of dilution in '21.

Great, thank you, Shifting back to the presentation, so we received a few questions around the 11,000 cabinet backlog number, Keith, that you had in your deck. How does this compare to prior periods, and what are the implications for future growth?

Well again, it's something that we've spoken about more specifically over the last 2 quarters. And part of the reason we did talk a little bit more about it was, we saw an aberration in the number of net cabinets billing that we added. And one it was really important for us to share with all of you, that there are -- there is a substantial backlog, there are some things that we were building, West Coast of the U. S., the Singapore as an example, who will be a large contributor to incremental billing cabinets. And so yes, it's at the higher end of what we typically see. I think you'll see a good portion of that release I think the month of June, and maybe it slips to July, I don't know, but the month of June and certainly the 3rd quarter. In both fronts, both the Singapore deployment I was referring to, and also the West Coast of the U.S. deployment that I was referring to. But again it's part of what we live and breathe, we're always going to have some element of backlog. Certainly as we grow in scale as an organization I would expect that our backlog would grow in scale, absent these 1 or 2 aberrations.

But it's probably on balance higher than it has been.

Yes.

And again that's the normal trajectory of the business. But it's certainly contributing to what we think will be a good '21.

Great. We received another metric question as well. So can you talk a bit more about your long-term utilization rates across your portfolio by region, and how have you see those fill rates evolving with different types of customers?

Well, our fill rates are strong across the globe, I think, and we've seen particular strength obviously in the bookings trajectory in the Americas over the last several quarters, which I think is incredibly encouraging. In terms of utilization rates, I think we've got room to continue to tighten those and grow in utilization across all 3 regions. We're a little bit tighter in Europe now but I think there's significant capacity coming online so we will probably gap down and then grow back into that in terms of increasing utilization. Again, I think we're headed in a really good direction in the Americas. And again, fill rates from customers have been very strong, I think, and it's coming at the right mix, it's generally been quite predictable, and I think we expect to continue to see that.

If I could just add, Charles, and one of the things that was in my slide, I made reference to the fact that we want to optimize our utilization. And so again, we're going to deploy the capital to its highest and best use in places that we need it. And again, as I think that you all know, we've got 36 projects under way, 28 markets and 19 different countries. And we've just announced a very substantial build program with xScale. So there's a lot of things that are going on, but suffice it to say we're going to continue to monitor our utilization with high intensity, because we want to take the capital and put it to highest and best use versus having inventory just sitting idle.

Great. Our next question comes from Michael Funk of Bank of America. What benefit of refinancing is in your forecast, and anything else you want to add around leverage assumptions in that forecast, Keith?

Well, look, we have refinanced all of our high-yield debt, so you've got the time frame of that, and of course we'll enjoy the -- we'll have the redemption fees that we'll pay out this quarter. Again, that has a relatively large impact on our taxable income and our net income because we redeemed them early. But we get the full long-term benefit of that on a go-forward basis. And they were very net positive value transactions for us. Having said that, there's always going to be opportunities to potentially refinance some of our term debt. This last refinancing, we did 2 of our markets. There is another market that we can look at to refinance down. Again, we'll look at facts and circumstances. But it's not going to move the needle on a go-forward basis. As I think about our leverage I maybe want to invert it and say well, how much cash do we want to keep on our balance sheet? And historically we used to say $250 million was the appropriate cash to keep on our balance sheet. I feel more like $250 million per region. So we want to keep $750 million of cash, liquid cash available to do what we do. And so we'll be very selective about timing on how we use the cash, deploying it to its highest and best use. But we have flexibility and right now, I don't want to give you any of the assumptions other than to say that all else being equal through 2025, you wouldn't meaningfully increase your leverage from 3.7x. You would use part of your ATM and you would fund the majority of it through incremental debt and cash flow. It's an absolutely awesome model to operate as a CFO. But I'm not going to give you the specific timing because again, I don't know. We have immense liquidity today, we have over $2 billion of cash in our bank accounts and we're being very judicious about how we spend it. And then we've got, as I talked about in the CapEx slide, the capital allocation slide, we've got CapEx that is being spent on behalf of xScale. When we move it, formally move it into the joint ventures, that money is going to come back to us as well. So between the cash on the balance sheet, the cash that we generate, and the money coming back from xScale, I think we're in a really, really good position.

Great, thank you. Shifting back to Charles, so in your presentation we got a question from an investor asking about our TAM. He asks, you discuss about expanding opportunity and pointed to a TAM potential of $80 billion by 2025. Can you discuss the different vectors Equinix will use to approach going after this TAM opportunity?

Yes, and it was $80 billion plus, and we think it's probably larger than that by 2025, but -- and I think it's going to be plenty of TAM to fuel our growth. But in terms of vectors, actually it's interesting because we were developing that and it was part of really exploring and unpacking our TAM led to how we packaged up our go-forward strategy of scale, extend, innovate. And in fact that's how I would really think about that. If you look at scale growing -- scaling our core business, as I said, we're going to continue to capture share in retail. It's showing, if you look at synergy research estimates, for example, showing a smaller growth rate at 6%, we think that's a little bit sort of suppressed for us because it's -- I think there are people in that supply side estimate who are not doing well, and who aren't going to continue to add capacity because their businesses are not thriving. I think we're going to continue to grow, continue to capture share. And scaling our business, more customers, more growth with existing customers and winning more share in retail is going to be a big part of that scaling. But -- and then secondly, we talked about extend. And so that's adding not only geographic reach to extend our reach and add in our retail business, but also extending via the adjacency that is hyperscale. And so that is a very fast-growing market. We're going to have a meaningful share position there. We're not going to chase share. We're still going to be very true to the strategic intent of the xScale effort, but we think we're going to be able to grow there. And then you saw these other areas, our other areas of addressable market that are overlapping with our business and are representing new opportunities, and that's the innovate piece. And so if you look at things like private and hybrid cloud, if you look at things like cloud networking, we're going to be able to tackle those with things like Equinix Fabric, which is already a $100 million-plus run rate business and growing at a very attractive rate, and with things like Network Edge and with digital infrastructure services like Metal. And so that's going to allow us to tap in. There was a really cool chart in Sara's presentation that talked about what we would get in terms of a per cabinet, or the revenue we would get from a traditional implementation of a network performance hub and what we get when that is implemented in Network Edge. And we just get more of the -- we get more of the revenue there. We get more of the wallet share from the customer, because we're solving a bigger piece of the problem. And so those are the areas we're going to be able to really tap into some of these markets. All of these big technology markets, compute, networking, storage are dislocating to as-a-service. And as they do that, our opportunity to capture more of that and capture more of the wallet share is increasing. So that's why we have such optimism about the size of the total addressable market and its ability to fuel what we have out there as our growth projections.

Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from Frank Louthan at Raymond James. And he's asked about M&A. So when you look at M&A, do you expect to be more heavily weighted towards tuck-ins, product acquisitions, larger strategic platforms? And then the second piece is, can you clarify if your guidance for growth assumptions assumes anything about M&A in there?

Yes. I mean I think you were clear on that one which was no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't include M&A. And so that's separate and distinct. As to the bias of our M&A, I would tell you, I don't think there's a lot of what I would view as platform sort of deals out there. Tuck-ins can range in size in terms of geographic extensions of our platform from small to meaningfully larger. And we think there are definitely some very attractive opportunities out there for us, and we think we're well positioned to potentially do those things. There's never any certainty on that. M&A is an uncertain world, but we have a great track record, and we believe that M&A is going to continue to be a great tool in our bag. And then we also -- I expect we'll do some technology-related acquisitions as well. I think Metal, we've learned a lot in that. I think it's really added substantially to our digital infrastructure services portfolio and also to our talent profile. We brought in a lot of great people in that acquisition. They're a great fit with our culture. I think we continue to figure out how to get the most out of them and how to really bring what they offer into our business in powerful ways. And so I expect we'll be active in that area, but again, in a disciplined and a targeted way.

Great. Thank you. And we actually have a different take on the acquisition question. So we got a question from Brendan Lynch from Barclays. And he's asking specifically, when you look at your capital plans, where does acquiring assets that you currently lease fall in terms of priority?

Do you want to take that one?

Sure. And it's funny now that you -- the question was asked. Thank you for that question. One of the things that is a priority for us is to continue to own more of our assets. What I failed to mention again in my prepared remarks was that there are certainly assets that we've already committed to acquire that are really important to us. And I won't disclose them just yet, but suffice it to say that will take revenues coming from owned assets from 56%, up closer to 60% over those 3 assets that we have acquired. And then we're working on some other things. So when I said, set out and said look, we're going to spend somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion over the next -- per year over the next -- through 2025. Part of it will relate to asset acquisitions. So make an assumption of $0.25 billion a year. And then a lot will go into organic growth, which you see and then digital infrastructure support. So we're really excited about our capital plan and what we think we can do and the growth aspirations that are there, but part of it will be owning our own assets where we can.

Great. I want to thank you, Keith and Charles, for joining us today. So that concludes our executive Q&A session. We're going to take a break and then come back for our deep dive sessions. As a reminder, please keep that Q&A coming. We're loading it up and we'll be taking live questions throughout the deep dives as well. Thank you.

Thanks for being with us.

Thank you. Bye now.

Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy a short break. Our program will resume at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time with our moderated deep dive sessions. [Presentation]

Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy a short break. Our program will resume at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, with our moderated deep dive sessions. [Break]

Please welcome, Director, Investor Relations, Chip Newcom.

Welcome back, everyone, and thank you again for joining us for our Analyst Day today. As a reminder, please keep the questions coming during our deep dive sessions today. [Operator Instructions] As the world's digital infrastructure company, Equinix cultivates scaled digital ecosystems to support service providers as they build out their infrastructure and to enable enterprises to access all the right places, all the right partners and all the right possibilities as they transform and embrace digital. Our next 2 deep dive guests play a key role in enabling and evolving the way our customers are consuming their digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix. So please join me in welcoming Bill Long, Senior Vice President of Core Product Management; and Zachary Smith, Managing Director of Equinix Metal. Bill and Zach, thank you for joining us today. How are we both doing?

Good. Thanks, Chip.

Thanks, Chip. It's great to be here.

Well, as we're waiting for some questions to come in from investors, maybe to start out with a high-level one, and Sara talked about this a little bit, but at its most basic level, digital infrastructure consists of storage, compute and networking. So how is Equinix evolving its product portfolio over the last couple of years to enable customers to consume these digital infrastructure building blocks, both on a virtual basis as well as on a physical basis?

Yes. Thanks, Chip. That's a good one to kick it off. I think Sara did a good job of highlighting that the core value that Equinix is providing and has been providing for a long time is not changing, of providing a place where people can put their distributed hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure. Really what so much of our strategy is focused on, as more of global GDP moves to be digitally enabled, we want to remove the friction from being able to access that value prop. So that journey started at Equinix with Fabric, where we first virtualized: instead of having to have a physical cross connect, you can now do that virtually with Fabric. Secondly, we did that with Network Edge, so instead of having to install and configure routers and load balancers and SD-WAN devices, you can do that now virtually with Network Edge. And then, of course, went with our acquisition of Metal, where you can use virtual -- you can use servers to deploy on Metal things instead of having to actually ship a physical server to a device. And then lastly, we're taking all of those components plus our physical products and putting them into a fully online experience. So it's both a combination of creating -- using virtual products that can be turned on in real time as well as creating a digital experience around the physical products. So those are the 2 main vectors of how we're attacking the problem.

This will be our first question coming in, from Tim Horan at Oppenheimer. With the growing digital infrastructure services business, how is that impacting or potentially creating conflicts with existing data center customers?

I'll -- Go ahead. Sorry, Zach, go for it.

Yes. Let me go ahead and take that for you here. I mean I think that as we move in to respond to our customers' needs for increased agility and being able to move faster with their global reach, we're responding by creating these fundamental infrastructure capabilities. And so with Equinix Metal, providing a foundational infrastructure option that can be deployed across 18 markets in a programmatic fashion, really keeps us to the heart of a hybrid multi-cloud strategy around how do we create easier ways to access Equinix's global reach, our interconnected ecosystems by providing a foundational product that allows us to work with our hyperscale customers as well as ISPs to put solutions on top of that, whether they do that independently or as part of a go-to-market together.

So our next question comes from Brett Feldman at Goldman Sachs. Can you discuss your plans or road map for rolling out your products and services across your footprint? For example, at what point do you expect Equinix Metal to be available across the entire Equinix platform? And how are you thinking about revenue contribution from these services over the next several years?

I'll tackle that quickly and then Bill can add on related to our overarching platform strategy. I think you'll hear that when we say Platform Equinix, we don't mean it lightly. We really are creating a platform that our customers can count on to scale globally with consistent experience as well as access to services. And so certainly, our goal is to be able to put our virtualized services across all of Equinix global markets, continue to expand as our reach expands. However, today, we're available in 18 markets for Equinix Metal, and Bill can kind of shed some light, I'm not exactly -- around that number for Network Edge. And what that's doing is creating that first wave where we can help customers in the most popular interconnection-dense markets, and then expand and move that further to the edge for those customers. Bill, maybe you can give some light on how we're growing and how you see that expanding?

Yes. No, I think Fabric is a good indicator of how we approach this. We want to make sure that we're providing enough of these products and enough in the markets that our customers can use them robustly, but we're also not going to overextend ourselves where there's not proven demand. So I think you will see us, certainly, like Network Edge, for example, we're going to be in 25 markets by the end of this year. And as we prove demand in those markets, you'll see us expand rapidly, but it will be a thoughtful process for how we roll it out into more and more parts of our footprint.

Great. This next question is for you, Zach. So this is coming from Frank Louthan at Raymond James. You've been in the bare market metal for a few years now, how differentiated is the Equinix bare metal product? And to what extent are you seeing it drive business?

Well, I mean, the key differentiator for Equinix remains the same across all of our different products, which is we provide global reach, a neutral access to ecosystems and the agility to move very quickly with your business and technology objectives. The introduction of Equinix Metal was very purposeful in that we tied it very closely to our Equinix Fabric ecosystem. And so by enabling interconnection as a key part of that value driver, what we're doing is creating an infrastructure primitive, for example with compute, with our bare metal product or with storage with our key operated appliance partners such as Pure Storage and others to come. And what we're doing is we're creating this foundational aspect that really virtualize that data center experience that you saw Sara highlight in one of her slides. Connecting that to Fabric and enabling access to that ecosystem is what really differentiates the product in the market and helps the value drivers for our customers.

And so a follow-up question for you, Zach, coming from John Dinsdale at Synergy Research. Do you have any concerns that your increased focus on metal and digital infrastructure services is putting you in a competitive situation with some of your most important customers, like the cloud service providers?

Frankly, no. Our job here is to provide a foundational product. Like I keep mentioning, making sure to say fundamental, in helping our customers doing what we do best, which is putting the right thing in the right place at the right time across Platform Equinix. What we're seeing is that true to our belief around hybrid multi-cloud as being the core strategy for enterprise customers, that we're seeing software solutions or as-a-service partnerships come with our hyperscale partners and land on things like Equinix Metal or interconnected with Fabric. A great example would be, about 2 weeks ago, when we announced Amazon's ECS Anywhere being fully supported on Equinix Metal. And it shows just how enterprises are looking for that workload control and management from partners either in ISVs or as hyperscalers and really turning to Equinix as a place where foundational fundamental infrastructure can live.

Bill, a question for you coming in from Jordan Sadler at KeyBanc. Can you compare and contrast pricing and margins among virtual and physical cross connects? And do we have any preference whether a customer uses a physical or virtual interconnection?

Yes. That's a good question. So on a price per unit basis, if you take all the Fabric revenue and then you divide it by the number of connections that we have and you compare that to the revenue per unit on a cross connect, Fabric on a per unit basis is a little bit higher, and it's higher enough such that it gives us roughly the same margins per connection that we get on cross connects. So while we do -- so largely, we're agnostic to which solution our customers want to use. If they want to use a Fabric -- a virtual connection for convenience reasons or to attach to people who aren't otherwise available with a cross connect, we love that. If they scale out and they want to be able to move that over to a physical cross connect, that's also good for us as well. So we're largely agnostic to both, but I do think that it's important to keep in mind the sort of strategic value, a long-term value, of being able to be a cross connect way. So during the pandemic, there were lots of customers -- as all of our lives were moving online to Zoom and other unified communications platforms, it was super important to be able to stand up a cross connect that could carry multiple hundreds of gigs of traffic that if you were using a network solution, that wouldn't be possible. So while we're largely agnostic to which tool our customers want to use, the long-term option value or strategic value of being a cross-connect way, we think will continue to matter and will continue to be a differentiator for us.

So a question for both of you coming in from Mike Rollins at Citi. So as we saw earlier today, Charles was defining our total addressable market as including digital infrastructure. So at what point and where do we think about drawing the boundaries in respect to developing our own products and services or acquiring them? How are we thinking about being a global digital infrastructure company? And how far do we think that can extend over time, whether it's thinking about other physical assets or physical products?

So I'll start, and then I'll hand it over to you, Zach, for some color. So I think it's -- again, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to move their infrastructure or to use infrastructure at a distributed hybrid multi-cloud location. And so our goals and our aspirations are to stay at the infrastructure layer and to make that as easy as possible, but we are maniacally focused on identifying and eliminating the points of friction that make that hard to adopt that type of architecture. So will we go further up the stack just because we can capture more TAM? No, that will not be sort of -- that is not our strategic intent. Our strategic intent is to create as big of a sail as we possibly can, to catch more of customers as they're moving to digitally enable their infrastructure.

So another question...

Yes. I completely agree. Maybe, Chip, I can add just a few points of color there.

Yes.

Which is that by removing those points of friction, by putting physical infrastructure across our platform and enabling it at software speed, by solving those network friction points for interconnection and access to your different NSP or commercial partners, we're really doing more of the work for our customers. And so naturally, we're going to see that TAM expansion, while we're maintaining the capacity and making sure that we can put the right thing into the right place, or maybe even helping to automate and provide integration services around those physical capabilities. So I do think that we're creating a bigger pool for Equinix by offering that kind of foundational capability to more parts of the stack. I think where the key differentiator for us is that we know that we're really good at physical infrastructure. And so by combining that kind of software capability and interfaces with something we know and have proven that we're experts and a leader in the world at, I think we can maintain a very, very large market and make sure to service our customers as the #1 partner in that space.

So another question coming in from Tayo at Mizuho. So what are the -- how should we be thinking about the cost savings as a customer adopts digital infrastructure at Equinix? And also, what kind of performance benefits might they see as they go through this process?

Yes. We'll start on some of the sort of -- with the physical stuff and I'll hand it over to you, Zach, on some of the others. So as an example, we've run a lot of use cases with customers who -- their first step as they're transforming their infrastructure is to transform how they do their networking. And so when they deploy network hub at Equinix, we've seen them get as much as 60% savings, if not more. So that's a pretty standard, and we have sort of cost savings tools that we provide to our sales teams and our customers about how they estimate for that first step of the cost savings that they may get out of moving -- that first step of moving into Equinix. And Zach, I'm sure you have some other stats on the savings with Metal.

Yes. What we see is just a huge movement of companies going through a digital transformation journey where they're looking to accelerate. And so part of that is getting into new markets quicker. And we have, as you probably heard with some of the previous videos before we came on, customers who are accessing the Equinix platform in 18 markets and doing it within days, just the accelerant of removing the months or weeks that take them to get infrastructure physically into -- in the market is creating cost savings to our customers. But I think the real opportunity is also the programmatic access that we're giving across our platform. So whether that's in our core services and transforming and putting APIs in front of how you transact with us or interact with our support teams, we're actually enabling them to use our digital infrastructure services like Network Edge, Fabric and Equinix Metal. What we're doing is helping them through a digital transformation where they can remove waste and cost and add more reliability and acceleration to their own businesses. And I think that's the real win.

Great. Another question came in from Nick Del Deo at MoffettNathanson. So to what degree are you seeing customers use digital infrastructure services as a temporary bridge before deploying in a more traditional manner at Equinix? And how sticky are we seeing these services over the long term?

That's a great question. And -- so we see it on Fabric. So one of the primary use cases for Fabric is they'll use an inter-metro connection. So if they're deployed in 2 different Equinix locations in Silicon Valley and in D.C., they'll use Fabric as a temporary connection to connect their deployments until their network provider solution is turned up. The network providers are promoting that as a solution, and so we're seeing that. And we're also seeing a similar thing on Network Edge and Metal, where one of the examples that Sara gave this morning was a customer who deployed in the Americas was moving into Europe. And we've seen customers who, they proved the demand and using virtual products in these new markets, acting as an accelerant for the physical deployment. So they will deploy first on their virtual product to prove demand in that market. And then as that matures and they get the volume and they can warrant, they've proven in the market that it's worth spending the time and the money and the effort to go and deploy physically, they will then deploy physically.

And Zach, what are we seeing in terms of sort of this approach on Metal?

It's a huge part of people's adoption and what Bill pointed out there in terms of testing markets or even testing entirely new workloads at Equinix is being able to use the usage consumption-based capabilities of our digital platforms to accelerate their movement into, "Hey, is this the right market for me? Is this a burst capacity that I need temporarily? Or is this just part of my adoption phase?" And so what we're really focused on, and Charles mentioned it earlier, is making sure like the best thing that we can do is ensure that the right workload or the right type of business lands at Equinix. And so we feel that these are ways that are -- you have to remember that with a fully automated platform like Equinix Metal or Network Edge, the cost for allowing our customers to leverage that is extremely minimal. And so by investing so much in our automation platforms, we're able to quickly turn up service programmatically with no humans involved. And so making sure that our customers can experience the benefits of Equinix, expand into new markets and then find the right infrastructure product for them, we're all about that, and we continue to see really robust adoption. A statistic that might be relevant for you is that all usage base is a big portion of the adoption phase with things like Equinix Metal. The vast majority of customers end up contracting to long-term commits for price benefits or also for stability over time.

One other point I'd add in there, Chip, is that similar to our physical products, on our virtual products, they are self-selecting for people who are interconnection-rich, and the same dynamic of lower churn once a customer has that interconnection density, we're seeing on the virtual products as well. So the dynamic of, come to Equinix, so you can connect to who you want to connect to. And then the retention risk is much lower once they've gone through the time and effort to connect to the ecosystems that are only available here, both on physical and virtual.

And a good question that came in from an investor that follows on with this. So how should we think about attach rates for digital services and for things like Equinix Fabric?

Yes. So the Equinix Fabric attach rate, I think there is, obviously, the -- when you have a physical deployment, you can get a lot of value out of the -- of using Fabric to connect to everything that you want to connect to. So there's a very high attach rate in a -- even with a physical deployment for Fabric. And there's going to be, we think, a little bit of the attach rate and how you think about the attach rates for the fully virtual products like Network Edge, and Metal is going to be a little bit different than physical colo, because if you're deployed virtually, you may not need a physical deployment. So we are seeing very good attach rates on Fabric, and we -- and those continue to grow and Charles mentioned a campaign that we have to drive that even further. But I think you will see -- we need to be thinking about attach rates between physical products attaching to Fabric for interconnection is a little bit of a different dynamic than the attach rate of a fully virtual product like Network Edge and Metal.

And Bill, one for you here from Aryeh Klein at BMO. On Fabric, is there any expectation or plan to extend it beyond the Equinix ecosystems into other data centers? Also, is that something that customers are asking for?

Yes. So we've looked at this a couple of times, and it's -- from a strategic standpoint, it'd be something we're certainly interested in it. But what we've found is that there's such a high concentration of demand in the rich interconnection locations, that the effort to go and actually deploy the platform, and then have another sales team that we'd have to train on the capability that the effort in order to do that is really not worth the incremental demand that we think is there. So we've looked at it. There's not a strategic reason why we wouldn't do it. It's more purely out of the amount of payoff that we could get by continuing to mine interconnection out of our own locations and out of our own customers, we think has a much better payback than relatively low interconnection per location if we deployed it more widely into lots more locations.

And one for both of you that here that came in from an investor. So are there certain industries, enterprises or customer types where Metal and Network Edge and our other services are making the most sense or we're seeing the most common use cases?

I'll take that here really quickly, Bill. And so the way I'd like to think about it is really related to personas. And so we have traditional Global 2000 enterprise customers who are investing in digital transformation, and they're starting to adopt our virtual products as part of that, they have a DevOps strategy. They want to expand and test markets, et cetera. Then we have our service provider customers who are really sophisticated with infrastructure, sophisticated with our value and what they're looking at it to do is move faster. And our digital products can often represent the accelerant that they need to justify new markets or respond to customer demands. And the third one, which I think is really a unique opportunity for Equinix right now, is our cloud native users, people who are just now discovering the neutral capabilities and ecosystems available at Equinix. It may have been born in the cloud, scaled large businesses and are now looking whether they have a multi-cloud strategy to move between multiple clouds, and they're finding out how their data-rich activities can live at Equinix. It's an entirely new customer demographic that maybe in previous, it would have been a high barrier if they didn't have network engineers or infrastructure expertise, we're removing that friction and allowing them to come and enjoy the benefits of our ecosystems.

Another one for you, Zach, coming in from a real estate-focused investor. So for someone who's focused more on the real estate elements of the business rather than the technology elements, can you quickly describe how Equinix Metal is consumed by customers and how we're billing customers for this service?

Sure. In fact, internally, I like to explain Equinix Metal as automated colocation. And so what we're doing is we're pre-positioning the physical compute hardware and networking in our data centers on behalf of a customer, and then they can consume it in a variety of ways. They can order it through a service order with the support of a sales rep. They can go into our customer portal and click and order it instantly, or they can also use our API to programmatically consume that infrastructure. They can do it in a usage-based model by the hour. So we have published pricing by the hour consumed by the different flavors that we offer or they can contract for benefits like guaranteed capacity or better pricing and turns. So we see most customers move to adopt. It's not one. They're going through all different ones. And as you may have heard earlier, our focus on channel partners is also bleeding its way into Equinix Metal, where our partners are coming in and building solutions and offering that as a package offering to our customers, embedded with our other products or with their own solutions.

So Bill, one that came in for you from a long-only investor. In your deep dive webinar, you talked a little bit about Secure Cab Express and that being a new product. So can you quickly explain what this product is and how it's going to impact both the direct and indirect sales channels?

Yes. So secure cab express, the simplest way to think about it is our highest volume colocation product is secure cab, which is basically a configurable cabinet. And what we're doing with secure cab express is we're going to have a prewired patch panel that you can connect -- cross connects as well as a Fabric port for interconnection into and then a software controlled power circuit. So that's the base product. And then that's going to be enabled with a full online ordering experience. So the customer will be able to go in and say, "Hey, I want 5 of these secure cab expresses in Frankfurt. Please go set those up for me." And our goal is, in a matter of days, to have that ready for the customer to install their equipment. So the advantages are, our customer gets to buy on online experience, which is the way they like it. Because we can predeploy that equipment, it can be much -- it can be available much faster for our customer. But the good parts for Equinix are that, because we're predeploying it, the amount of OpEx per deployment is much lower for Equinix and we can -- because we are predeploying that infrastructure, we can actually pack it tighter into our data centers. So the overall data center utilization over time should start to go up as we're able to basically fill in the white spaces in our data center with this product. So it's the combination of what our customers want, how they want it, delivered faster that's good for them, but also in a way that bends the cost curve for Equinix as well.

And so one question for you here, Zach, coming in from Sami Badri at Credit Suisse. So is there a path towards strategic partnerships with cloud service providers? And at what point could it make sense for them to potentially be using Equinix Metal? If so, why would they end up using this?

I think there is -- we've seen a lot of interest from our customers who are looking for a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, and so we're investing deeply with our hyperscale partners as with our other ISVs, large software partners like IBM, Red Hat and VMware and Nutanix and others, to figure out how we can meet the needs for our customers to have an integrated experience where they can get the software and services and capabilities they want in the right place. And as long as that's attached to a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, we think we have a really strong place to play and support our hyperscale customers in reaching those end users.

Well, Bill and Zach, thank you so much for joining us today. Really, really great to hear both of your perspectives. For all of the investors, we're going to take a quick break. So our next deep dive session on sustainability is going to begin in 5 minutes. Thank you for joining us and enjoy the break.

Great. Thanks, Chip.

Thanks so much, Chip.

Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Zach. [Break]

Please welcome Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainability, Katrina Rymill.

Hello, and welcome back. We are very excited to be here today hosting our sustainability panel. I'm joined by Janet Ladd, Senior Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging and Jennifer Ruch, Director of Sustainability. Both are leaders who are instrumental in shaping and progressing our sustainability programs. We continue to advance a bold sustainability agenda here at Equinix, and we look forward to sharing more about our programs today. So with that, I'd like to welcome Janet and Jen. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Glad to be here.

Thanks everyone. Thanks, Kat.

Great. So let's go ahead and start broad. And between these 2 gals, we can cover the whole depth of sustainability. So please continue to submit your questions. We are taking them live. So let's start with just an overview of our environmental, social and governance programs. Jen, can you just walk us a bit more through how we think about those programs, the targets and the goals longer term?

Sure. Thanks, Kat. As Kat mentioned, I'm Jen Ruch, I'm the Director of Sustainability at Equinix. At Equinix, we are embedding a future for a sustainability strategy within our business, and that means we're creating sustainable value for all of our stakeholders, everyone from our investors, our customers, our employees and our communities. For us, sustainability encompasses ESG. So that's our environmental, social and governance initiatives. Within the environmental pillar, we are doing more to protect the planet. And this includes addressing the urgency of global climate change through our ambitious targets, such as the science-based target and global climate neutral commitment that we just announced last week. We're also investing in green finance to increase our investments in our green buildings and environmental sustainability initiatives of the company. Within the social pillar, we believe people can be the world's force for good, and that's why we want to empower and connect our employees and our communities. We have a robust diversity inclusion and belonging strategy. We're increasing our attention to global benefits and well-being. We're also engaging more with our communities through Equinix impact. And finally, we want to do what's right to lead the way through our governance efforts, everything from legal and compliance to our Board-level ESG oversight, and finally through our increasing efforts around public policy and advocacy.

Thanks, Jen. And I know you could speak for about 3 hours about our programs and all the depth around that. In fact, for those of you who haven't had a chance, definitely check out the deep dive kiosk videos that are posted on our website, really going in depth across a variety of topics. So with that, let's turn to Janet. Let's dive a bit more into the social side. How do we think about social sustainability here at Equinix?

Thank you, Katrina. I'm glad to be here to talk about these important issues. We started our journey on social sustainability in 2014 with community grants and our definition of business success continues to be success for our communities and for our employees. In 2020, $2.8 million was given and $900,000 of that was to racial justice or COVID relief, which was done through a 2-for-1 giving campaign after corporate matching with our employees. And we continue our momentum on diversity, inclusion and belonging anchored in 3 ways, one, we know diversity improves financial performance. It shows in the research again and again, as well as an impact on innovation. And secondly as you heard a number of times today, it is aligned with our vision of creating a workforce where every employee can say, I am safe, I belong and I matter. And finally, inclusion and belonging create a place where people want to be. It brings stability and brings that extra discretionary effort that people bring to their jobs in the way that we partner together and the way that we serve our customers. And you can see that consistently in our lower-than-average turnover in the last 3 years and our consistently high employee satisfaction scores.

Yes, absolutely. And maybe going a little bit deeper, Janet. I mean it's been a tough year across the board, whether it's COVID, the challenges around social injustice. How did Equinix think about changing its programs and supporting its employees across our 63 markets?

Yes, COVID created substantial change. 2020 was a year like no other. And our culture was tested and really came through stronger. We focused on safety protocols for our employees in our data centers, and then we also relooked at our well-being offerings. We pivoted offerings to focus on mental health to add additional support for managers that are supporting virtual teams. We also offered over 1,000 virtual well-being offerings, everything from yoga to meditation, nutrition to improve immunity, sleep, ways for employees to connect with each other even as virtual hallway conversations. And the other thing we did is we created a space to talk about what our collective experience was going through the process. And so we brought up issues and shared employee stories around confronting racism, social isolation, depression and grief. And so it created a way for people to acknowledge and connect with the people that they were with as human beings as we went through this unprecedented time together.

Thank you, Janet. And I'll just say from being an employee here, that was so important to be able to shift what's always been a really good culture for a company, but have it in a virtual format. I know your teams did a tremendous amount of work around that. Now we can't have an Analyst Day without having some exciting announcements come out in front of it. And you saw several, right? We talked about the announcement with GIC last week and another really big announcement was around sustainability. We announced we were the first global data center to have a 2030 climate-neutral target, which we're very excited about. Jen, can you talk a little bit more about how did we think about those goals? And what does it mean for us as a company?

Yes. So our announcement is really exciting because we are the first global data center company to commit to being climate neutral across our global operations by 2030. And this commitment, it's really building on 5 years of effort at Equinix. We set our 100% renewable energy goal back in 2015. At the time we joined RE100 and we started embarking on this ambitious renewable energy strategy and power purchasing execution effort. And since then, we've grown our program to over 90% renewable worldwide. That means that over 180 of our data centers already purchase 100% renewable energy. So these climate targets really build on the capacity that we've already built within our organization and help differentiate ourselves as leaders. In addition, it increases our attention on other topics, such as our Scope 1 emissions as well as our supply chain.

Absolutely. And maybe Jen let's follow up, a little bit more about the supply chain. How do we think about engaging with the supply chain, and what are some of the newer efforts that are going to be happening around that?

Yes. Really exciting here at Equinix. So our science-based target commits us to a 50% reduction in electricity-related carbon losses. So that would be our transmission and distribution losses. And really, it also commits us to 66% of our suppliers in the areas of purchased goods and services and capital goods, engaging those suppliers to set their own science-based targets. And we feel like this is going to have incremental really a big impact in the space because not only Equinix, but other companies working on climate targets are going to pressure these suppliers to do their own part in reducing global emissions across their own operations.

And I know we've seen a big pickup from customers reaching out around sustainability. Can you both talk a bit more about what are -- why is it important for customers for us to be green and for us to have the right DIB metrics? And what are some of the things we're hearing that's important to them?

Sure, I'll go first and then I'll pivot to Janet. So for customers, we've been hearing from customers for many years that the location of our data centers needs to offer additional aspects such as low carbon or renewable energy. We're in the supply chains of the world's greatest companies. So for them to hit their own climate targets and their own renewable energy goals, Equinix needs to step up and do its part. So we've been building our internal capacity to buy renewables. And my team is also engaging with customers to help them understand the benefits of being inside of our data centers from a carbon reduction and renewable energy strategy aspect.

And we're also looking at the diversity of our supply chain and putting in the tools and resources to help us in that journey. It's still early days. But we are seeing also other opportunities to partner with customers in the space of diversity, inclusion and belonging as we're all in this journey together. One great example was our Faith Connect network partnered with similar groups in Google, Apple, PayPal and Salesforce to put on an event to teach everyone about Ramadan. So both to support and honor that community as well as to help everyone support their Muslim colleagues through that time.

Great. Thank you. Now you're talking to a group of investors. So beyond, which we care a lot about, that it's the right thing to do, how do we think about this in terms of business performance and how it kind of feeds back into how we help perform to our stakeholders?

Sure. I'm happy to go first, Kat. So all of our stakeholders I think are growing in interest across the ESG aspects. 90% of the S&P 500 currently issues a sustainability report. So sustainability is really top of mind for a lot of companies. And our ESG efforts, especially things like our renewable energy and climate target directly help our customers reach their goals in ways that they couldn't achieve themselves. So we have the scale and the global reach to help reduce and drive down carbon emissions in our business, and therefore influence the greening of the digital economy.

And then maybe, Janet, do you want to add around how do we think DIB and how that ties back to employee engagement?

Yes. I think the research continues to show, and McKinsey started in 2014 and found a 25% differential in leaders and laggers on gender representation in the organization, and even higher when looking at race and ethnicity. So we know the dynamics of diversity, support decision-making and risk taking and innovation. And so how we think about those things at Equinix then is to look at it from a diversity, inclusion and belonging perspective. So we look at how do we bring in a diverse workforce, how do we attract, retain and develop a diverse workforce. How do we build in the systems that support how we think about DIB, and really run it as a business. And the third is how do we empower all employees to be part of the DIB process. And so that's where we see high engagement scores. But I would also say we have the employee networks that Charles has mentioned earlier. We have leaders around the world that have stepped into those roles that are making a huge difference, expanding their influence and reach. And as we look at engagement across those groups, it's even higher. And so it's not only a way to improve the overall culture of the organization, but we're developing leaders and we're expanding talent.

That's great. And maybe going -- diving a bit more into diversity, what are the, some of the things we're actually changing here at Equinix to increase diversity in our workforce?

We have a recruiting team that is especially dedicated looking at new pathways into Equinix. So we've created 11 new paths for candidates to find Equinix and it's things like looking at those from adjacent industries or veterans transitioning to work or Paralympians transitioning into the corporate space, or even mentoring college women in IT and STEM and making the connections that way. We're also looking at community college scholarships and really focused on new to current internships as a way to bring more people into the organization, and we have our most diverse intern class that has just joined for this summer.

Excellent. We have an investor and question coming in. What are the incentives are there for the management team to promote sustainability and ESG metrics? And then how do we, as investors, monitor how you're doing to achieve these goals?

Sure. So I'll start that. So I think all of our executives, especially our executive steering committee for sustainability, are really invested in seeing Equinix grow as a sustainable leader. So not just our environmental sustainability efforts, but really across the ESG spectrum. So someone like Raouf, our global operations lead, he's really invested in growing our renewable energy strategy, driving attention to detail on our energy efficiency strategy and globalizing other ways that we're approaching environmental sustainability. The second part of that question, Kat, can you refresh my memory on the second part?

How do we report back to investors on how we're doing on these metrics?

Sure. So measurement and reporting and transparency are really critical and differentiating, I think, for Equinix. We have used the Global Reporting Initiative, GRI framework for a number of years at Equinix to issue an annual sustainability report. And in the last 2 years, we started publishing information with our annual report, first as part of the shareholder wrap. And secondly, this year, including SASB, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board has recommended real estate energy metrics within our 10-K. Besides that, we do a lot of open engagement with our investors and our customers. We publish various pieces of information on surveys such as the Carbon Disclosure Project or CDP, climate change survey, and we answer a number of surveys even on behalf of customers, so such as [ ecoBETA ], so a supply chain ESG survey.

Thank you. And I know the entire sustainability team, we care deeply about metrics. And you see it reported in our CSR report that we actually just launched and is posted on the IR website. And okay, so another investor question asking about the renewable number. Is the 90% renewable number, is it a total amount of Equinix megawatts? Is it for properties? Or how should we think about that percentage? And then what is the sources those renewables are coming from?

Sure. So the 90% renewable really means that for every 1 megawatt hour of electricity that Equinix consumes, we will buy 1 or 0.9 in this case, megawatt hours of electricity that's from a renewable source. So it's calculated on a total annual electricity consumption basis across the world. If you look at individual properties, we buy 100% renewable for over 180 properties. So combined, on average, that equates to 90% renewable for the company. In terms of the products that we buy, we buy a range of different products that align with industry best practice. For example, we have virtual power purchase agreements, or VPPAs, located here in the U.S. that supply 225 megawatts of capacity of wind power, and that equates to about half of our U.S. load of renewables. Beyond that, we work with our local suppliers to identify green products or green tariffs that will deliver us renewable energy and the certificates associated with it. And then finally, we leverage certificates in markets where there aren't liquid renewable energy opportunities. And our renewable energy team is continuing to look at both new markets as well as products that have more impact and really bring more renewable energy online locally.

Thank you. We also have -- we have 2 questions actually around water, which is an evolving topic for us. So Barclays' Brendan Lynch asked, can you provide some commentary on what you're doing to minimize water usage, what metrics you plan to release? And how might these efforts affect operating margins? And I'll take the margin question, Jen, but you can start on the front part.

Sure. So historically, most of our focus has been on energy because it's really our most material environmental impact for Equinix. The amount we spend on energy is hundreds of times greater than the amount we spend on water. However, with climate change, we are seeing additional risks associated with water and droughts or flooding. So we want to be mindful of how we're using water inside of our data centers. Our global operations team as well as our design teams are currently thinking more about how do we identify our key priorities in each region, depending on water scarcity. For example, we might choose air-cooled data center designs in certain markets where water is scarce. But in other markets, we might prioritize energy reduction and choose water-based methods. So it's really a learning process for the company. At the same time, we recently increased our investment in our center of excellence, whereby our global operations teams are identifying all of the sites that use water for cooling and identifying what their usage is, what their WUE or water usage effectiveness is, and we'll be continuing to improve those metrics internally for additional publication externally.

Yes. I would just add in from a margin perspective. Obviously, if you think about the biggest cost from a metric standpoint is the power side. So when we look at the amount of power, we benefit both from sustainability, but being able to optimize energy efficiency there. For water, it is a little bit newer area. It is a balance between water efficiency and optimizing off those sites. So I think it's -- it will be a new and expanding area for us. Okay. Next question came in from an investor. Are customers in any specific geographic regions more interested in environmental sustainability?

I mean I think the natural answer is, of course, Europe is really driving the conversation. However, we're getting increased interest out of Asia Pac as well as America. In Europe, you've got the European Green Deal that's driving the conversations. And that's one of the reasons Equinix took the leadership position of working with the European Data Center Association to found what's called the EU Climate Neutral Data Centre operator Pact. This pact, which is a coalition of not just Equinix and the EUDCA, but other peers and other industry trade organizations, has proposed a self-regulatory framework whereby the data center operators will self regulate and meet renewable energy goals, energy efficiency goals, water reduction goals as well as circular economy goals. So the conversations, I think, concretely really began in Europe. But what we're seeing is discussions are coming from all over the world at this point, in terms of how do we drive sustainable value across the world.

Great. Well, let's shift back to Janet for a bit. So 1 area, and Charles had highlighted it quite a bit in his intro presentation, was around the employee connection networks, which is a new mechanism for us. Janet, can you talk a bit more about how are we thinking about these programs and how are we engaging employees around them?

Yes, we have expanded. We had now 8 Equinix employee connection networks and have had a ton of energy from employees around it. So these networks are bold grassroot networks where employees come together and talk about communities that are important to them, as well as sponsored by Equinix, supported with an executive sponsor member from our E team. And they really look at what is the experience as a community, what is the business case for what they're driving, where are their systemic barriers that they want to address on behalf of their community. And they also look at how do we create allies. How do we change all of Equinix to be as inclusive as possible. And just a couple of examples of the types of activities that happen or events that happen, I would say, is last year, as we were in June and heading into what was designed to be a Pride Connect event, the leaders of that organization really said we would like to pivot this event, invite the other networks to be a part of our broader conversation about equality and social justice. And we put together a 24-hour event with 24 different conversations around the world that was open to all employees to really be a part of understanding and sharing and building awareness of how we can more broadly support each other and hear from these underrepresented communities at Equinix. So they have been employee-led and are incredibly important in how we listen, how we learn and how we work together.

Thank you. And so important how we connect. So one of the more recent activities for Equinix in general has been around our green bonds activity. And it is -- our treasury team has been very active. We've done over $3.7 billion. Jen, can you maybe dive more into how do we think about setting up the green finance framework and what was -- what's sort of the next layer of goals underneath of that?

Sure. Yes, we were really excited when the treasury team came to us with this opportunity. The green finance framework that we wrote really demonstrates our commitment to building and operating in a way that's environmentally sustainable. So our green finance framework, it really set a new benchmark for the data center community because we outlined key goals in several major categories. Number one, we agreed that we would invest in green buildings. And specifically, we would build to higher LEED green building certification standards, targeting LEED goal. And we would also build to lower operational or design -- sorry, design PUE standards approaching 1.45 or better. So that was the first category. Secondly, we would invest in more long-term and impactful renewable energy strategies and contract mechanisms. So this would be everything from our virtual power purchase agreements to new and innovative ideas such as a green hydrogen project, for example. Thirdly, we would invest in water reduction and energy efficiency. So 3 and 4 were water efficiency and energy efficiency. And finally, we're addressing circular economy in clean transportation. So really, our green finance framework gives us kind of a North Star to aspire to, and our global operations teams can take that and execute against that. And on the flip side, we can use our reduced cost of capital, go out to the market with additional kind of insight around our environmental impacts at Equinix.

Okay, thank you. Our next few questions are a bit more on the technology side. So we had a question from David at Green Street. So you -- can you confirm you're using Bloom fuel cell energy at SV11? And then maybe talk a bit more about, how do we think about the benefits of fuel cells and maybe what are the cost differences of why we'd want to use fuel cells versus a traditional utility grid?

Sure. You're absolutely right. We are using Bloom fuel cells at SV11. And the unique thing about this deployment is that the fuel cells are actually installed to provide power to the sites without the use of a diesel generator backup necessary. We do have them on site for customer purposes, but the goal is to really demonstrate that Bloom can be our single source of reliable power and the grid can be our backup. And the reason for doing this is that Bloom provides an always-on power solution that is delivering power right on site, so that really eliminates the losses. And it's also cleaner than traditional forms of power. It's, I think, 30% cleaner than your typical grid. And in addition, there are ways that we can green the fuel cell energy consumption from a renewable energy claim standpoint. So we're really looking at fuel cells as a way to improve our -- both our cost of power as well as the reliability and the greenness of the power supply.

Great. And then 1 more kind of deeper dive question on the environmental side. So this question comes in from Simon Flannery from Morgan Stanley. And I'll just echo, it's around diesel generators, but that is a question that's been coming up more and more with customers. And the question is, can you discuss opportunities to move away from diesel generators?

Yes, this is a hot issue for data center operators. And the fact is that diesel generators, while they do produce emissions, they produce about 2% of our global operational emissions. So 98% of our emissions come from the electricity that we buy. Therefore, it's really imperative that we reach our renewable energy goal. As a secondary and longer-term kind of commitment, Equinix does want to investigate moving off diesel generators. And we're looking at everything from fuel cells to nonfossil supplies of diesel as well as green hydrogen markets, and where these technologies that are not yet commercialized could potentially play a role in our backup power generation at Equinix.

Great. So I want to thank Janet and Jen. If you can't tell, we like to talk about sustainability here at Equinix. So please visit our website, sustainability.equinix.com. We look forward to continuing the conversation. So next up, our next session will start in 5 minutes. It's on our ecosystem. So enjoy a short break, and thank you for joining us. [Break]

Please welcome Equinix Chief of Staff to the CEO, Ryan Khalessi.

Welcome back into our digital ecosystem's deep dive. As you heard through our executive presentations this morning, delivering distributed global access to digital ecosystems remains at the heart of our strategy in how we deliver value to our customers and ultimately to you, our shareholders. As digital transformation continues to accelerate, digital leaders will win by putting ecosystems at the heart of their own business and IT strategies. Joining me today to discuss digital ecosystems, what they are, why they're important and how they're accelerating are Jon Lin, President of the Americas; and Steve Madden, Vice President of Digital Transformation and Segment Marketing. Jon, Steve, thank you for joining us.

Our pleasure.

Hello, Ryan.

Well, this is probably the most formal I've seen you 2 over a Zoom screen in quite some time, looking sharp as always. Well, let's get started. I mean -- and maybe with a little bit of vulnerability. I've been at the company now a little over 5 years, and it took me probably the first couple of years to learn what the heck digital ecosystems are. And I think, Steve, it was back when you were actually giving a lunch and learn to a small group of us. So maybe let's start there. Steve, can you -- digital ecosystems are a hot topic right now. Can you just explain what they are and why they're important?

Sure. Well, we know companies are starting to form digital services and they're seeking new revenue sources. And that could be because they're start-ups moving into the digital market, or they're transforming existing companies, like some of the companies we talked about today are over 100 years old. But as those companies form those services, they go to a marketplace or a place where they can connect and exchange their services with each other in either marketplaces or in collaboration places which are digital ecosystems. And as they grow in size, digital leaders are using those ecosystems to gain speed and growth and scale all over the world. Because if you can subscribe to what you need and not have to build and develop it yourself, you can move very fast and gain a lot of traction very quickly. And if we think about the whole digital economy as things shift from traditional revenue streams to digital, and the World Economic Forum said that by 2025, 90% of the GDP, the global GDP is going to be from digital revenue sources or digital transform services then the pressure is on, right? And the timing is such that everyone is scrambling to seek their place to secure their position in that market and the future economy.

Thanks, Steve. Well, I mean, to that point, we know digital and ecosystems are going to play a huge role in the economy going forward, and we heard that from Charles this morning as well. Jon, maybe can you talk a little bit about that value and what it translates to for investors?

Yes, absolutely. Our focus on enabling those ecosystems is the key to driving long-term value for our customers and thus back to our investors. As you heard earlier in the day, ecosystem participants drive more revenue, they grow faster. They have higher interconnection rates than other kind of generic retail co-location customers. And that drives our strong interconnection revenue growth and the differentiation we have there. And it further creates really a virtuous cycle for us. We get higher yields of extremely sticky revenue while driving business value for our customers by solving the physics of having more ecosystem density and driving better performance. And then by doing so, we drive more network benefits by targeting more of those ecosystem participants, continuing to add to that entire ecosystem. And I like to think about it as just riffing off of Charles's theme of scale, extend and innovate -- during the pandemic focused on scaling our existing ecosystems, right, helping the peer and networking and trading communities support that explosion in traffic and equities volume that was going throughout the pandemic. And we're always looking to continue to extend the new ecosystems of digital ecosystems at large and especially using cloud connectivity in hybrid environments, and as Steve pointed out, with new platforms and services models emerging every day. And on the innovation front, it's both using and creating new products like Fabric and Network Edge that accelerates customers at the time to deploy as well as discovery capabilities of all of the participants that are already part of Platform Equinix, as well as internal tools like data science and AI and machine learning to help us identify and target high-propensity prospects for their ecosystem potential and making sure that we're targeting them.

Awesome. Thank you, Jon. Well, in terms of how -- we've talked a little bit about what they are and why they're important. But in terms of how they're accelerating, Steve, can you talk a little bit about how trends like 5G, edge compute, IoT, et cetera, are playing in accelerating -- or I guess, developing and accelerating ecosystems?

Yes, absolutely. I mean 5G is critically important, especially to us and to the digital economy because the bandwidth constraints or limitations at the edge and the Internet will actually slow things down. So we've been helping a lot of our providers get ready and ramped up to have that capacity for 5G. But what we're seeing in those technology deployments is there's a number of companies co-specializing solutions alongside of those providers, everything from autonomous vehicles to facial recognition at airports, there's a number of different companies and software providers involved that have to all be integrated in order for that new function or that new service to work. So the ecosystem growth is not only huge, but solutions are now becoming ecosystem stacks, of various technologies being brought together to deliver much greater compounding benefit. And the data generated begets more analysis and more things we can do, more things we can understand, which creates more solutions, which creates more data. And so yes, the whole thing is just super exponential.

Thanks, Steve. Well, a question that came in from Brian Partridge from 451 Research. And Jon, maybe you can answer this 1 is, building off 5G, can you talk about how the global rollout of 5G will directly and indirectly drive Equinix business opportunities in the year ahead -- years ahead?

I guess looking at the landscape, it's probably still early, right? I think we are -- well, obviously, we've got a lot of teams covering the space, both talking with the carriers, the technology providers, the content and clouds around that to understand hey, on that far edge opportunity, so to speak, what's really materializing there. And I think it's too early to provide any kind of revenue projections on what that might turn into. But just to say, we want to stay engaged there and understand what data is being created there, how is it going to be processed. But I think regardless of our direct opportunity on the far edge, we know that more data being created will drive back to what our sites are, right, which is kind of the edge at large and certainly into the core. And so our ability to make sure we're maintaining our relationships with those providers, expanding our awareness of how we can help solution that and really talking about these ecosystems that are creating more data, like IoT and autonomous vehicle and AR/VR, and making sure that we're well positioned to capture that and help them with their needs on the data science side, is incredibly important.

Thanks, Jon. Another question that came in from an investor. Steve, we know digital ecosystems mean more than cloud and SaaS. With ecosystems growing across all industries, what's driving that?

Well, as their own services become more digitized or digital, it's a lot more efficient for them to operate and function by growing and connecting their supply chains, value chains, collaborating on data and analytics and things that Jon was just talking about, participating in marketplaces of high-volume transactions or simply just tapping into more technologies. All of these different things are not just bases of where they just consume, they're now also providers in those ecosystems and they're offering their own solutions and services that way. So some of the industries are moving faster than others. Clearly, electronic trading was way ahead of the game. But now we're seeing the same sorts of things growing in more of the slower-moving industries. Like health care, manufacturing, education, public sector, are all becoming more digital as they shift to these new revenue streams.

Thank you, Steve. Jon, maybe another question for you, specifically on Network Edge. What are your thoughts about the far edge as it relates to Network Edge? Or will most use cases be suitable for your existing IBX assets?

I think there's certainly a lot of white space for us to capture in terms of our existing IBXs in terms of capturing that network edge. And again, I was saying, I think we want to stay close to, and we've certainly looked at alternate models of engaging with the far edge and deploying services into those markets. And I think we'll stand ready to pounce on those if the opportunity arises and it represents compelling value for us.

Great. Thanks, Jon.

Ryan, can I add to just that point, [ just add ] to Jon. The thing that we did see was that even the solutions that are being built at the edge, as we said before, are still connecting multiple partners to be delivered. And where they all interconnect is typically inside Equinix. So the edge is still going to need a place of communication and collaboration in order for those solutions to be built.

Thanks, Steve. Well, another question for you, Steve. Can you discuss the impact of data sovereignty requirements on how ecosystems are developing? And that just came in from Simon Flannery over at Morgan Stanley.

Yes, sure. No, data sovereignty and all of the data regulations, not only the emergence of them and the growth of them, but also their change, have a huge implication, not just as to where they place or use data, but also the routes that data takes or the fabric and different networks matters as to us at any point, does that data actually leave that sovereign boundary. So we've seen that in terms of the need for edge compute and edge storage to place compute locally in different countries and metros and not backhaul it to a typical core, simply for the reason to make sure that they're localizing on their requirements of regulations. And as those data regulations change and as we move into more countries, we're very conscious of making sure that how we place our own services, enable customers to still maintain their own regulatory requirements.

Thanks, Steve. Jon, a question for you that just came in from an investor. How do you see Equinix's position in the edge computing market compared with telco providers, who are deploying mobile edge compute infrastructure in their own data centers?

Yes. I think it's complementary, right? Obviously, those telco providers are all large customers of ours, and we work closely in partnership with them to understand, how can we help them with that solution, whether that's in our facilities in, as Steve mentioned, pulling that compute infrastructure back in from a network perspective to our facilities to be able to connect with the rest of the ecosystem and data that, that their end customers are going to need. I think that's probably the near-term opportunity for us. And in the long term, I think, again, like I said, we're in a lot of strategic conversations there around exploring what the art of the possible is and what space we could potentially play in there.

Awesome. Thank you, Jon. Well, maybe 1 follow-up for you, Jon, unrelated, and this just came in from an industry analyst. To what extent do joint ventures contribute to our ecosystems? Are our JV efforts with xScale considered to be part of our ecosystem model?

I think it's -- the JV efforts really are focused on helping us capture more and more of those hyperscale deployments, which I think ends up being an indirect driver of our continued ecosystem development. I don't know that we would attribute any direct ecosystem growth with just our relationships with the capital partners themselves. But certainly, our deep ties to the hyperscalers and what we're solving for on the xScale side, ends up again continuing to seed that flywheel and motion around our ecosystem development with the cloud providers.

Thanks, Jon. Steve, maybe a question for you that just came in from Mike Rollins over at Citi. Within the updated global interconnection index, can you define the concepts of digital providers, leaders and followers as well as how you define edge growth on Slide 16? Within this page, why do the followers end up with greater cabinet growth but less edge growth than other cohorts? Have you done any additional longer-term studies to determine what may happen after year 4? Lots of specificity, but as one of the authors of the GXI, I think you're best positioned to answer that.

No, I know exactly the page you're talking about. It's a chart that shows the path different leaders, followers and providers take over a multiyear journey, what they deploy, who they interconnect with, how many regions they end up with. How much of their infrastructure is core? How much is edge? It's a very interesting analysis that we've been able to bring to market. But also, it needs to be taken in a holistic sort of a view. So what it's basically saying is some of those industries, like I said, are more advanced and have done a lot more and are starting to look more like a profile of a digital provider or a digital service provider, than of a traditional enterprise company. Some of the other industries are followers, but they're -- it's nothing bad. They're fast followers. The growth rates in health care are super huge. And also manufacturing is now in the digital leader category because of the moves they've made in the last couple of years. But what that essentially is showing is that some companies are building into more locations and using more and more other companies and ecosystem partners and connecting to more resources a lot faster than some of the other companies are. And that's why we classified them as followers. They are building out their infrastructure and their core and they are starting to emerge into moving into ecosystems, but by comparison to other industries still way behind. And then the last part, I think, was growth beyond the 4 years. All of those customers in there, and there's about 450 in that analysis, are all still growing. We just snapped the line at those 4 years to sort of start to map what that journey looks like. And there's another index coming out this year, Volume 5, and we're going to update all that data as well to include more information.

Good. Well, you must have a good memory, and I'm glad you have the GXI probably memorized by heart at this point. Well, switching gears a little bit. Jon, a question that just came in from an investor. Northern Virginia often says that 60% to 70% of global Internet traffic flows through data centers in Northern Virginia. Is this percent declining over time for areas like Northern Virginia, London and Singapore? Or is it increasing?

Great question. I think over time, what we're seeing is it's staying stable or maybe slightly accelerating, right? I think the concentration of growth inside of some of these key data center markets that are ending up being the data hubs and then kind of the engine room for all of the cloud ecosystems that are developing, that's quite strong. Now that doesn't mean that there isn't exciting growth opportunities outside of those markets though, right? And obviously, with our footprint, we're well positioned to capture all of that. But just given the preponderance of [ folks ], when you're starting a new site, et cetera, you're still looking at using one of the major cloud providers, that default footprint, still the easy button for them is still going into some of those big markets, right? And so we're continuing to see great growth there.

Well, on that note as it relates to kind of connections to cloud. Steve, maybe for you, the question that just came in from Nick Del Deo from MoffettNathanson. Per Charles's presentation, it looks like cloud accounts for 16% of interconnections, but is the fastest-growing category. Would you expect the rate of cloud interconnection growth to remain roughly at current levels over the next few years? And can you expand on the enterprise to cloud opportunity?

Sure. Clearly, as Charles' presentation outlined, the first step that a lot of these companies do is connect with the network providers and establish their backbone and global backbone for scale. And then almost at the same time, they're connecting into clouds and third-party partners. And the cloud connectivity is growing because of new customers connecting to new clouds and also more clouds. So they might establish connection in 1 availability zone area, but then they're also going establish connections in another availability zone like East and West to make sure they have redundancy, and then do that again all around the world. So the growth is not just from companies connecting to cloud, but companies connecting to multiple clouds and multiple metros and growing in terms of what they connect for. They don't necessarily grow in the number of connections to each individual cloud because once they're connected and wired into their own infrastructure, it's less about whether or not they have a connection or not and more about how they're splicing and using those connections. And I don't remember what the second part of that question was, Ryan, if you can refresh my memory.

Yes. Can you expand on the enterprise to cloud opportunity?

Oh, yes. So all enterprises are benefiting from leveraging cloud in order to shift or unload a lot of the workloads and applications that they're managing, and supporting building or even writing themselves for years. And so when they shift into Equinix and connecting to multiple clouds, they start doing what we said you should do from a platform standpoint and the platform ecosystem, is to leverage people who are good at that. So the SaaS applications in the SaaS market are actually now probably -- or not probably -- our data shows that enterprise spend on technology, the largest line item, is now SaaS. So they have gotten rid of their old in-house applications or off-the-shelf applications and are sourcing SaaS, and they're doing that through the connectivity and proximity of Equinix.

Great. Thank you.

And maybe just as a quick follow-on to that, Ryan. I would just say it's been really exciting to see our traction on that discussion, as Zach mentioned, with more cloud-native customers, right? I think that's an area where in the past, they didn't really understand how to process and digest Equinix's core interconnection value and ecosystem value. And now with Equinix Metal as an offering, being able to deliver a differentiated infrastructure platform but doing it in an API in a way that they're used to consuming it is creating more -- a lot more value, right, and being able to get those SaaS providers then that otherwise would have been obscured behind other cloud providers directly connected with more of our customers, is a really exciting future for us.

Yes. It's a good point, Jon.

Awesome. Thank you, both. Another question, Jon, maybe for you, that just came in from an investor. As the world increasingly moves to being a connected digital ecosystem, does Equinix primarily benefit from a revenue perspective with colo and interconnect, or are there other ways to monetize?

I think we shared earlier today about some of the other ways we're looking to monetize that from a digital infrastructure services perspective. I think there's a robust opportunity in front of us for both, though, right? And I think the game is yet to be played and understood on what that will translate into. But we know that the needs for interconnection are extremely high. We know the needs for data sovereignty, as was mentioned on the earlier discussion in processing, are high. And so our opportunity to address that continues to be really, really strong. I think it's really exciting as well that just know that our relationship with the channel community, with the partner community with the technology community that they're also leaning in towards us as much as we've been leaning towards them, right? Just seeing the announcement yesterday and having Jensen talk earlier today about NVIDIA's participation, saw the announcement about Dell, about HD, about Pure Storage, it's kind of a rolling drumbeat, right, the realization that every -- all of this workload is best suited by being enabled inside of Equinix, is something that's really resonating in the market.

Awesome. Thank you, Jon. Steve, in the deep dive clip for the session, you mentioned our data science function, which is used to curate and create ecosystems. Can you talk about what kinds of momentum and outcomes we're seeing from that?

Sure. Absolutely. It's also used to produce GXI and all the data that goes into that. But we created that data science function to observe and study the market and study customers, help understand our market and our customers better and get more information to do more homework, so when we show up in front of the customer, we're able to actually come in with a story and some recommendations and be more useful in that conversation. But what that data science function does is it builds a model that determines the propensity to need digital infrastructure. And we've evolved that over 5 years. And so now what it tells us is out of the 525,000 companies we loaded it with and processed and went through the algorithms, it spits out like 12,000 that have a much higher need for not just digital infrastructure, yes or no, but how much digital infrastructure and where. And who -- we're moving into now is -- who are they going to need to connect to. So this gives us a chance to go and focus our priorities and resources on people who need us the most and want to move the fastest. And the results we see from accounts that are on that list versus accounts that are not, is that they land with us. We're 3x bigger in size, and they grow about 5x faster over our relationship with them than a traditional account. And so we have continued to make that a study and a focus for us to work now with our partners and solutions and how can we prioritize the right solution for the right conversation at this time in that customer's journey and help us all succeed.

Thanks, Steve. Well, maybe with the time we have left, 2 final questions, 1 for each of you. And Jon, we'll start with you. As President of the Americas, we know you're talking to customers every day. How are conversations with customers evolving from pre-pandemic to mid-pandemic to now as we hopefully look towards a post-pandemic world? And as a result, what are the key use cases you're seeing from customers?

Yes. One, I think all of the condition of the pandemic helped really galvanize the idea behind you don't want to just be a supplier for your customer, right? You need to be a partner, you need to show up well consistently and provide deep value. And I think that was a big differentiator on the front end. I think starting up a new relationship with new customers, as everybody heard last year, is tough in the middle of a pandemic in a situation like that. So the ability to really expand our relationship with existing customers, show them how we can drive more value with them, was incredibly important. I think the other thing that we've been seeing is customers are thinking much more future oriented around digital transformation, right? And so in addition to solving for the needs for today, the realization that everything over the last 18 months is going to fundamentally transform some of what they need to do into the future, means that they need to solve for the needs of today with an eye towards tomorrow. And so that creates a lot of excitement around the ecosystem work that we've done, the products that we're bringing to bear to help address that, the reach that we have, the market coverage that we have that we can continue to bring to bear to help support their needs. I think the other part is just, it increasingly really reinforced all of the importance in the motion that we've created with our channel community. I think the ability to, again, leverage our partners and for them to leverage us to be able to really talk to the customers and figure out, hey, how can we really help them during that time. And now going into the future, like that foundation is incredibly strong and you're seeing everybody start to emerge. Again, in the U.S., the situation is great I give a shout out to my colleagues in Brazil and Mexico and India and the Philippines, which aren't at the same place and it's -- we're hoping for improvement over time there. But it's, we're starting to see the U.S. at least come out of some of that cloud, right? And that's really, really encouraging to see. And those -- that relationship that we've built over the last 1.5 years is setting us well for the future.

Thanks, Jon. And Steve, last one for you is, as an investor, what compelling ecosystem trend or shift should we be paying attention to?

That's a good one. The one that's got me captivated right now is all of the traditional technology manufacturers who weren't necessarily selling into corporate data centers anymore as they shrink and aren't necessarily positioned well for cloud, where cloud might be competing with them, have found a home between edge and cloud at Equinix. And you saw the announcements that came out just this year. And Jon was just mentioning it earlier, HPE GreenLake, Dell Apex, Cisco Plus, we have NetApp, right? We have all these solutions now that are looking to grow in that market, and they're also co-specialized. So they deliver those solutions far better than a do-it-your-own solution could have done. And so that means more efficiency, more green and more initiatives for us. So I think that's the 1 I'm focusing right now, because it's so powerful. Seagate announced the hyperscale storage solution that they're now offering, so going from a disk provider to now a hyperscale storage solution provider. This is fascinating and he's looking at a $50 billion TAM just with Equinix. So what they're doing and what they're driving is going to speed up everything for everybody. So that one is the one I would focus on.

Well, thank you, both. Thank you, Steve, and thank you, John, for sharing with us the power of connection and the power of ecosystems to unlock significant value across different stakeholders. I have enjoyed my time with you both all dressed up, but I'm excited to change out of this suit. And while I do that, I hope you all enjoy our next 5-minute break as we prepare for our final deep dive on xScale and hyperscalers. Take care. [Break]

Please welcome Investor Relations Manager Katie Morgan.

Thank you for joining our last deep dive session this afternoon. As Charles and Keith discussed with you earlier, we have ambitious plans for xScale in 2021 and beyond, as the rapid growth of the digital economy fuels increased demand for cloud connectivity. Our xScale program is focused on serving the unique core deployment workload needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies, including the world's largest cloud service providers. Joining me today are Royce Thomas, Senior Vice President, Strategic Alliances and Global Account Management; and Krupal Raval, Managing Director of the xScale Infrastructure Team. Krupal, Royce, how are you both doing today?

Awesome. Thanks for having us, Katie.

Hey Katie, thanks for having us.

Great, thank you. And to start, Royce, for you, you've been a sales leader here at Equinix on the GAM team for over a decade now. How have you seen Equinix's relationship with the hyperscalers evolve, and why do they now want to work with Equinix for their large-scale deployments?

First off, I have to say that I love working with our customers, and the hyperscalers are some of my favorite, having worked with all of them since before they were even called hyperscalers. We have deep, long-term relationships with all of the hyperscalers via our Global Accounts sales organization and Strategic Alliances, which is a group of over 60 dedicated team members. That focus over the last 10 years has resulted in building the business with them to over $900 million of annualized revenue, with a major focus on retail edge, network node and cloud on-ramps. These customers have been asking us to support their larger footprint needs for many years now. They want to extend their service with us for larger needs, and the xScale facilities match that need especially when they're on the same campus as their cloud on-ramps, or nearby.

Great, thank you, Royce. And maybe as a follow-up, can you elaborate on how the xScale program has evolved since our prior Analyst Day in 2018?

Yes, well, in the last 3 years we've really increased the dedicated resources to the effort around the globe, across sales, engineering, commercial solutions, and aligned with the resources in Krupal's xScale organization: Design and Construction, Operations, and Customer Support. In addition, we work closely with our customers to align our contracts for xScale and make it easy for customers to buy across the globe under a repeatable contracting vehicle. This has resulted in significant sales across the xScale footprint, as well as positioned us to be a key partner for hyperscalers as they expand globally.

Thank you, Royce. And Krup, don't want to leave you out of the conversation, so shifting over to you. Royce discussed the evolution of xScale. Looking ahead, how would you characterize the future opportunity for xScale?

Thanks for that question, Katie. To start with, we're exceptionally pleased with how much this program has already blossomed. The fact that we're looking at just shy of $7 billion in total expected capital across the various JVs that we've already announced. We're quite honored by the fact that we've been able to blossom this program so nicely over the past handful of years. But that said, when you look at the number of metros that we're in as a company, with well over 60 metros, and compare that to the number of metros that we're in for xScale, which is 10, 12, 13, the fact of the matter is that there's a tremendous amount of growth opportunity. But equally, we're not keen to grow for the sake of growth. We really want to build on the back of what our customers need. So our objective really for growth is not to have targets for the sake of having targets, but really to be in service to our customers and accommodate whatever growth ambitions they have, and to be a true partner to them and be a solution provider for them.

Thanks, Krup. And one last broad question to kick it off with, just establishing context for the audience. Can you elaborate on how your team is structured and how you interact with Royce's team? And then Royce, how -- as a follow-up, how you interact with Krup and team?

Yes, great questions. So in terms of how our team is structured, we're still a pretty thin team but we get the benefit of partnering with all our colleagues at Equinix, which is obviously the world's largest data center infrastructure platform. So we really get the benefit of partnering, as Royce mentioned, with all the various stakeholders within the organization, from operations to legal, to finance. It runs the gamut. So we really get the benefit of the full organization. With regard to our team itself, we have commercial experts, we have technical experts and we have development experts, all of whom are really in service to helping our customers understand what this product looks like, and really listening to our customer -- customers to make sure that we're building a product that reflects what they need. And therefore what we do is, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with all of Royce's team, with their expertise and their deep relationships, to really accommodate what the customers are looking for, and making sure that we're building a product that really mirrors what they need.

Yes, and I would just add to that, Krup said it well, that it's a deep trusting relationship that we have between my sales organization, our sales engineers, and the xScale, JV, technical, operations and commercial teams. We work together, we meet with the customers together, and it's a great partnership. And just for everybody's note, it's not all full of guys that don't have hair. So great relationship with Krupal and team.

Thank you, Royce. Royce, there's a question for you that came in from Mike Rollins of Citi. In our presentations, we show the cloud on-ramps mapped across the globe. What is the significance of the markets in which the on-ramp availability is not within an Equinix campus? Does this provide a source of future growth for Equinix? Or does this reflect the competitive environment in which different data center competitors bring different on-ramps to customers within each market?

Hmm, great question, Mike, thanks for that. This does present us with a growth opportunity when a CSP places an initial on-ramp in another location than Equinix. Many of those locations on the map that we showed previously in Charles' presentation, as well as the video that Krup and I showed, are for newer Equinix markets where the CSPs built out prior to us entering some markets; for example, Seoul. So at first we will tether to the cloud on-ramps in other locations to be able to present them as part of our Equinix Fabric ecosystem. And then over time, we'll monitor the demand from Equinix customers for that CSP in the market. And then we work with the CSP to place a native on-ramp inside of Equinix. In addition, the hyperscalers are all looking for diversity for their on-ramps in the markets that they're in. And so they look to expand and diversify within each of the metros that they reside.

Thank you, Royce. And for those of us that maybe aren't quite as tech-savvy and so for some of our real estate-focused investors, can you just help us understand what a cloud on-ramp exactly is?

Okay. Let me describe it, and this slide actually has designations for the clouds, but the cloud on-ramps from the major CSPs are Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, AWS Direct Connect, Oracle FastConnect, Google Cloud Interconnect, IBM Direct Link, in addition to others. Each of these on-ramps provides a private network connectivity to each of the CSPs. They also connect to our Equinix Fabric, enabling customers to architect their multi-cloud virtual connectivity. So these on-ramps enable customers to directly connect to the CSPs without traversing the Internet.

Thank you, Royce, for that context. We have a question coming in from Jordan Sadler of KeyBanc. Krup, I think this question will be best suited for you. The rent rolldowns seen by some of your more scale-focused data center company peers are likely a function of the increased competition in this space and the attendant reduction of required returns. Given Equinix's strategy in hyperscale, do you expect that your assets will experience the same dynamic over time? And Part 2 will be, will you look to exit the xScale assets through sales over time to mitigate this and to realize the exit promotes?

Great questions, Jordan. With regard to the rolldowns that our peers are seeing, it's tough to be able to crystal ball it. But in the end, what we're most focused on is establishing long-term relationships with our customers. And they see a definite value proposition that we bring to the table, given it's not just simply building a compute facility for them and moving on, it's really about a long-term relationship. Yes, to Royce's point, we really have very deep, long-standing relationships with our customers. So in the end, our objective is really to maximize our engagement with our customers. And that's where the focus lies. With regard to monetization, it still feels a little bit early to be talking about monetization of our portfolio, because this is only a 2-year-old program when you think about it. But in the end, we were exceptionally grateful for the fact that we've been entrusted by our customers in such a healthy scale. So as a result, we're doing well in terms of our bookings and well ahead of what we originally conceived many years ago. And that said, maybe we will be thinking about what that monetization strategy is going to look like sooner than we would have originally anticipated. But suffice it to say is we haven't really fully fleshed that out in granular detail just quite yet.

Thanks, Krupal. And last week, we had a really exciting announcement announcing our third joint venture bringing the project to over $6.9 billion across 32 facilities. Can you just provide the audience a quick overview of the announcement and help us think through the -- why we selected the metrics we did for the JVs?

Sure. First and foremost, we're over the moon with excitement just based on how much this program has already blossomed. It's a real testament to the strength of our organization and all our colleagues that have made this possible. So really it's a testament to the culture -- the commitment to culture that we've demonstrated as a firm, for everyone to be so committed to this program. So it's on the back of that, that we have this ability to be able -- even able to be able to offer a program of this scale this quickly. And equally, we're thrilled over our partnership with GIC. They've been exceptional partners and we're obviously quite pleased with how much that relationship has also blossomed. So with some of the specific numbers, obviously, Katie, you just mentioned that the $6.9 billion is a pretty healthy number across the 32 facilities. But one thing that we want to also highlight is that, that 600 megawatts is really well distributed globally. We're in every one of the major metros, we're in the Americas, in EMEA and in APAC. And that too -- in each of the markets, we've chosen markets that simply reflect where our customers have told us they have long-term capacity requirements. And so we -- the entirety of this program strategically has been focused on being customer-centric, and the metros that we've chosen are really reflective of the markets that our customers are asking us to explore. And it's that central core of customer centricity that really drives what this program is. So it's not -- as mentioned before, it's not putting pins on maps or just having robust numbers to be able to boast about, but really being in service to our customers and helping them with their capacity requirements throughout the world.

Thanks, Krup. And we have another question that kind of ties nicely to that, from Sami Badri of Crédit Suisse. Sami asked, looking to future JV opportunities, is there potential for the JV partner coming into North America or abroad to be different? And is this expected to be a similar relationship as far as the leverage and balance sheet?

Sure. Great question, Sami. With regard to the second question first, the structures that we're looking to target are principally the same, where our co-investment partner would provide 80% of the equity, we would provide 20% of the equity. And generally speaking, we're looking at a 50% debt-to-equity ratio, which is really the -- it has a benefit of that capital multiplier effect where we put in $1 of our equity and are yet able to deploy $10 of capital, which is a real good multiplier of our capital, which also preserves our capital for higher-value opportunities like the digital infrastructure services in our core retail product, which our investors obviously love. So that's the capital stack breakdown. With regard to the potential new partner that we're bringing in, our intent is to start globally. But one of the most important principal elements of how we're choosing our partners, the #1 in fact, is a cultural match. We take a lot of pride in the commitment to culture we have at Equinix. So we want to make sure that our investment partners reflect those same values. And equally, a core portion of that value is a commitment to the customer. So to be able to grow in markets where our customers need capacity, we want our co-investors to have that same ambition to deploy capital globally as well. So a part of the strategy for us is to make sure that we have a roster of investors that we can grow globally with, to accommodate the requirements for our customers. That's the true nature of what we're looking at.

Thanks, Krup. And Royce, shifting back to you. We have a question coming in from Simon Flannery of Morgan Stanley. How do you see the hyperscalers deciding whether to partner with Equinix or another third-party data center provider versus building their own facilities? And is that percent shifting over time?

I think each of the hyperscalers has a different strategy. Many of them build their own data centers. But due to the rapid increase in digital transformation, they're not able to completely satisfy the capacity requirements to support their customers. And so it's a very competitive market in terms of the wholesale providers who are willing to sell major portions of data centers or complete facilities to each of the hyperscalers. There's plenty of opportunity out there. We're really excited with the results to date, having pre-leased most of our Phase 1 of Tokyo, and completely leased -- preleased facilities in Dublin, London, and earlier this month, preleasing one of our facilities in Frankfurt. So I think that each of the hyperscalers looks at their customer demand and they evaluate whether they can self-support it or if they need to go to third-party colo to support that. And the money that we've just raised through the recent announcement with GIC enables us to go to more markets that our customers have asked us to be in. So we feel like we'll be in the right places at the right time to meet their demand.

Thank you, Royce. And we have another question coming in from Mike Rollins of Citi. Krup, I think this one will be for you. On xScale, the original 5-year projection was for up to 700 megawatts for $5.5 billion of CapEx, while the announced JVs are for 600 megawatts for $6.9 billion of CapEx. What are the contributing factors to the higher investment levels from the prior high end of the range of about $8 million per megawatt to the current build plan of about $11 million to $12 million per megawatt?

That's a great question, Mike. Thanks for that one. I would say that it's very complicated because it depends metro by metro. So obviously, there's different inputs, whether it be land costs metro by metro or it be the various labor markets. So it's a little bit of a complicated equation. But I wouldn't say that we're investing above what we previously expected, because if you look at our return expectations, our return expectations are generally directly in line with what we had expected. But the definition of the product is also kind of changing with time. And that's really a testament to how the customers have really embraced the trusted relationship that we have, and they've been a huge contributor, helping us design what the program really ought to look like. So said differently, what we're looking to build is something that our customers have had great input into, sharing insights from their experiences with other parties as well as with ourselves. And this is the product that they want. So we're building a product that is exactly what the customers are looking for today as the marketplace evolves. But that said, all of our expectations from returns are still in the core and it's aligned with what we had previously shared. So it's not like we're overinvesting in our capacity. We're just building the capacity in direct mirror to what our customers are looking for.

Thanks, Krup. And shifting now to some of the guidance that Keith provided earlier today. This question comes in from Jon Atkin of RBC. With the $1 billion of revenue expected from xScale by 2025, is that amount expected by Equinix? Is that both the pro-rata revenue that would be captured below the line in the equity investments as well as the fee income above the line?

So the $1 billion in revenues at the JV level, and we earn our 20% stake as a co-investor and this is our equity contribution to that. So that's, generally speaking, we get 20% of that revenue stake. But in addition to that, as Keith pointed out in his remarks and in that presentation, there's a series of fee streams that we're earning, some of which are at the front end, and the latter half become just a recurring fee stream. So our equity return is augmented by those fee streams. But we -- that $1 billion is a JV level revenue.

Great. Thank you. And one additional follow-up. We received a few questions on clarifying if the 3% to 5% AFFO per share accretion from xScale that Keith mentioned earlier is included in our AFFO per share guide of 7% to 10% per year?

Sure. Yes. And as Keith mentioned in his earlier presentation, we do expect xScale to be a contributor to our AFFO per share growth and -- especially as we continue to scale the xScale program.

Thanks, Krup. And shifting back over to you, Royce. We have another question coming in from Nick Del Deo of MoffettNathanson. Maybe it's hard to say how -- given how early it is, but is there any evidence that creating an integrated Equinix and xScale campuses drives enhanced interconnection revenue or draws in more enterprise customers, versus the current arrangement where Equinix is proximate to the hyperscale-oriented facilities operated by others?

As we were just adding the xScale facilities onto the metros that we've deployed. So initial indication is that we're increasing the virtual circuits that are connecting through Fabric to these cloud providers that are co-located in a campus through the xScale platform. And we do anticipate that it will continue to drive increased interconnection above and beyond the initial expectations for each of the cloud on-ramps because we believe that it will drive an enhanced experience for mission-critical applications. Lower latency to the compute should result in higher interconnection rates.

Thank you, Royce. We have another investor question coming in here. Hyperscale competitor yields are between 6% to 8%, while Equinix is targeting 12% to 17%. How is Equinix able to drive 2x the yields? Krup, maybe that's for you.

Yes, I'll take that one. And it's a great question. I think sometimes it's apples and oranges, because we may be talking about cash on cash yields versus our returns that we're earning as Equinix, especially with the fee streams that we're earning as well. So it may be a little bit of apples and oranges. But that said, a lot of our focus historically, at least all the $7 billion that we've announced to date, has been on the rest of world, because we look at the North American market in particular as well-saturated. And frankly, we want to be able to provide value to our customers as well as our shareholders. So we want to make sure that we're targeting markets -- again, not to sound like a broken record, but we're not growing for the sake of growth, but we're really trying to accommodate whatever capacities our customers are looking for. And so in the end, what we're focused on is -- mostly has been historically focused on the rest of the world as opposed to North America. And in many of these markets, and I think Keith had mentioned in his presentation, we're targeting markets where we can really bring the weight of our organization and the expertise that we built across all of our different subject matter experts, to be able to provide solutions in very otherwise-difficult markets. So a lot of the entrepreneurial startups that you can quickly put up a building, that's not necessarily our bread and butter. Our bread and butter is focusing on markets where we can really demonstrate that value for being a truly global platform and having the depth of bench that we have. So that's why we focus our energies on non-North American markets or non-U.S. markets, I should say, to date.

Thank you, Krupal. We have another investor question coming in for you. How should we think about the cost to build for an xScale dedicated project vis-a-vis our retail dedicated projects?

Really, really good question. In the end, what we're focused on is building a product that our customers are looking for. So we know that there's a certain level of finish in our retail facilities that really perfectly mirror our brand standards. But knowing the fact that our xScale customers are very cost-conscious, we want to deliver a product that is exactly in line with what they're looking for. And so as a result, we're -- when you look at a xScale facility, we're never going to cut corners. We're definitely going to maintain our brand standards. So we're not trying to just simply be expedient and build as cheaply as possible or cut corners. So that's a good thing. But equally, it's not going to be at the same level of finish as our core IBX product because it's a different product. And so in the end, we're trying to balance between investing appropriately to make sure that we're building to the global brand standard that our customers have gotten used to. But at the same time, make sure that it reflects the compute facilities versus the IBX facilities and the different nature of those 2 different products.

Thank you. And Royce, one more question for you coming in from an investor. At our last Analyst Day, we discussed a selected group of targeted customers for this offering. Has this grouping of customers evolved since 2018?

Thanks for that question. We remain focused on the initial set of targets that have significant demand. But we're currently evaluating adding more targets to the list as the needs of growing SaaS and IaaS providers increase for the xScale type demand. So I think we'll continue to focus on the set of customers that we have and evaluate incremental customers to target with xScale product.

Thank you, Royce. And maybe one last question for both of you in a rapid-fire style. What excites you most over the next few years for the xScale opportunity?

Well, maybe I'll go first -- go ahead, Royce.

We are both excited. I'm excited that Krup and Keith and team have raised more funds to build more data centers so that the teams can go out and meet the needs of our customers. And it's really exciting to see the pace of growth across the CSP customer segment, and that's truly evidenced by digital transformation, and our customer base expanding connecting to those cloud service providers. So working with them excites me every day.

Yes. I think, Royce, I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying. And just to piggyback on that, I think that one of the most exciting elements for us is seeing how this program is evolving with time. We're really trying to be adaptive and listen to our customers. And so it's not, we'll sell you any color Model T to you as long as it's black. We're really focused on listening to the customer, making sure that we're building products that are in markets that they want to grow in, and it's a product that they actually want to buy. And the adaptiveness and the acceleration of the program really is a testament to our team, our 10,000 strong colleagues at Equinix that have really leaned in heavily to really accommodate our customers. And that customer-centricity is not just empty rhetoric, but it's truly sincere and earnest on everyone that I get to speak to at our company. So our engagement with our customers really reflect that, and that's exciting. So I feel like we have the foundation upon which we can build a really meaningful program, and I'm thrilled about being able to be a part of that.

Well, with that...

I would just -- let me just add that I want to thank all our customers because they're at the center of everything that we do. And without it, we could build great products, but they are the ones that we're focused on. So thank you to all our customers.

Such a good point, Royce. Well, with that, thank you both for being with us this afternoon. This concludes Equinix's 2021 Analyst Day. Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to continuing the conversation at future investor events.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending Equinix Analyst Day 2021. This concludes our scheduled program. To access recordings or copies of today's presentations, please visit the Investor Relations page on equinix.com.