Data center company Equinix and GIC, a sovereign wealth fund, will develop and operate xScaleTM data centers in Japan. Equinix is a top data center provider in Japan with 13 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers and more than 500 employees.
 
The three initial facilities in the $10 billion joint venture – one in Osaka and two in Tokyo -- will serve the core workload deployment needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies, including the world's largest cloud service providers. With these xScale data centers, says a release, hyperscale companies can add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix.
 
According to the release, the initial three facilities included in the joint venture will provide approximately 138 megawatts (MW) of power capacity to the Osaka and Tokyo markets when fully built-out.
 
xScale data centers provide hyperscale companies with a differentiated value proposition from existing wholesale data center operators in two key areas:
  • xScale data centers offer access to Equinix's suite of interconnection and edge services. These services will tie into the hyperscale companies' existing access points at Equinix, thereby increasing the speed of connectivity to their existing and future enterprise customers, the release says.
  • xScale data centers are engineered to meet the technical and operational requirements and price points of core hyperscale workload deployments. This enables hyperscale companies to consolidate core and access point deployments into one global provider to streamline and simplify their rapid growth.