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FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06
Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity)
Page 1 of 12
, Senior Manager, Investor Relations and Sustainability
, Chief Accounting Officer
, Barclays
Brendan Lynch
Simon Miller
Brendan Lynch
Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
Barclays Global Technology Conference
Company Participants
Katie Morgan
Simon Miller
Other Participants
Brendan Lynch
Presentation
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brendan Lynch, I cover Communication
Infrastructure here at Barclays. I'm joined today by Equinix's Chief Accounting
Officer, Simon Miller.
Simon, welcome.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Thank you. Appreciate it.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Forward-looking statements?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, absolutely. So, we'll be making some forward-looking statements today. So
please refer to our SEC filings for the risk factors affecting our business.
Questions And Answers
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
(Question And Answer)
Right. Maybe as a place to start, Equinix has, 20 years now, been enabling -- to
execute on their digital transformation. Maybe you could just give us an update on
where the average enterprise is in that process. Maybe any changes in all the states
of evolution.
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A - Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. Really good question. And it's, as you can imagine, I'd say, it varies across the
board. You've got your kind of folks operating on the edge that lean in early. They're
probably a good portion of the way through it. I'd like to consider Equinix one of
those companies we're going through our own ERP transformation right now,
converting from Oracle On-Premises to Oracle Cloud. ERPs are a critical operational
set of tools to operate the company. And what we found when we go through that
type of transformation is that there's a host of ancillary application stacks that need
to be converted as well, because they don't tie in from an on-prem basis to a cloud
basis very well, and you don't get all of the feature and things. So, a company like us,
we're only about halfway through that. I've got at least another year on that
transformation just for the ERP, and then we're going to start to get to work on some
of these other ancillary applications with that.
There's probably some other real quick early adopters, smaller companies are going
to be able to do it a lot quicker, but when you're talking about that broad swath of
enterprises, it's probably going to be still five to eight-year kind of transformation
that's going to take place for companies over the next several years. The big
companies like S&P, Oracle, Microsoft, they're all going exclusively cloud in the
future. So, if you're on-prem today, you're going to need to acquire some sort of
cloud architecture solution in the future. I mean you're going to need to do it at a
place like Equinix, quite obviously, where all of the other tools that support that
transformation, all of those providers there within Equinix as well as the carriers that
provide connectivity into those providers.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
A lot of progress, but still some room to run.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
I still feel like it's very early. I mean, for us, we had a few delays. There's just a lot of
learning that goes into it. You're really moving from an architecture that has been in
the market for the better part of 50 years. Ripping that -- a cloud solution is different,
is what I would say. You don't customize anywhere near as much, but you have a lot
more configuration capability. And I think going through the evolution, really looking
at what do you do inside of your four walls and how do you have to do it differently,
that was part of the process that I think we didn't fully appreciate going in, but that's
a little bit of extra time as we move through the development phase.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Interesting that -- to hear that Equinix has to go --
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
I know, I actually wish Keith, our CFO, would talk about it a little bit more often,
because we live it internally. But yes, no, we're drinking our own Kool-Aid internally,
for sure, and utilizing our own resources (Technical Difficulty).
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Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
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Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
It introduces the next wave of digital transformation, and AI is getting an enormous
amount of attention. And a lot of companies are talking about how -- when they're
asked about AI, they say, "Oh, we've been doing AI for years." And I think there's
certainly some truth to that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about legacy AI
applications, for lack of a better term, versus some of the AI demand that might be
stemming from ChatGPT-oriented --
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
For sure
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
-- hype demand over the last 12 months.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. And we have, like, we've had AI inside of our four walls for several years now. It's
-- they're more niche applications. When you think about ChatGPT, that is a
consumer-facing, large, massive (Technical Difficulty) but you've got a got various
use cases for AI work, real-time AI analytics, doing something along the lines for an
internal use application suite and enterprise that is very focused. That type of stuff
has actually been around for the better part of four to five years, and certainly
increasing. By the way, that's the type of stuff that is perfect inside of an Equinix data
center because you're trying to crunch a ton of data like all of these works
historically and process it all and get real-time answers. You're using a smaller data
set that is very easy to provide compute right next to connectivity.
That's the type of stuff that is getting launched and has been launched now. I think
it's going to increase in size and volume as, as some of the bigger, I'd say tool and
fast providers push AI alternative to the enterprise in a more, let's say, generalized
fashion to be able, not to necessarily replace, but enhance a set of tools that they
already have out there. That'll be another layer of complexity. And then there's, of
course, the consumer facing kind of a big transformation point in generative AI
application.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
And are you seeing any of that generative AI large language model demand yet, or
that's still probably a few years out?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
We probably won't see that on the retail side of our business, but we're definitely
getting a decent amount of inbound requests and discussions on the xScale side of
our business. So, what you're describing, the large learning models or language
models are much, much more compute focused. They need a high amount of
density in terms of power. Generally, the deployers of that, if you're thinking about a
hyperscaler, which is probably where they want to play mostly, they're looking for
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A - Simon Miller
areas -- they don't need to be super close to network. So, they're looking for
locations, where they have a ton of access to real estate expansion and power,
because they want to build facilities that start at 200 megawatts, get as big as 500
megawatts, maybe as big as a gigawatt.
They want access to the power, they want access to the power cheaply, they don't
need to be around large city centers. It's a high-compute environment. Where that
stuff eventually gets pushed into the inference model, where I think the -- pardon
me, the opportunity for Equinix on the retail side of our business will start to expand.
And we're starting to see a little bit of that, but again, it looks a little bit more like a
niche, home-grown AI model that people are serving up for themselves.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Okay. I want to come back to xScale in a minute, but maybe just a few more on AI.
You had some wins recently with CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, Crusoe, I think a few
other AI startups as well. Can you just characterize the nature of that leasing? Is it a
large footprint in a single facility? Is it distributed throughout the U.S., throughout
the world?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, it's a couple locations, and really about leveraging our network nodes. It's that
piece of delivering the inference out on the edge of the footprint as opposed to all
of the compute that we've done on the backend.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
As you're building out into the AI realm, I think the positives would be that you're
establishing a new ecosystem and kind of tapping into it as you did with the cloud
for the past 15 years or so. Maybe on the negative side, it's an unproven business
model. Talk about how you'd consider some of these risks and opportunities.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, it's definitely unproven, but I would say, boy, it does feel like cloud 2.0 all over
again. And back in the day, we heard a lot of questions around our business model,
whether the cloud was friend or foe. And at Equinix, we have just some of the best
team thinkers on the technology side. And we really sat down and developed a --
how do we become the home of the cloud and develop a series of products to work
with hyperscalers to create cloud on-prem, and blend that with our network
connectivity to offer solutions to customers. AI feels like the same. It feels very similar.
Once the inference engines get put to the enterprise or to the data center, the way
we're looking at it is it's just another stack in that suite of applications that I was
talking about as a business leader that I need to implement and have supported.
We're thinking a lot about it as it being just another stack that companies are going
to need to have highly interconnected talking to other sources of data in their
architecture. If you think about, so I have a bit of AI in my world. It's mostly --
wouldn't call it fully generative, but those AI bots need to be proximate to where my
data is, because it's grabbing data out of ERP, it's modifying it in some way and
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Q - Brendan Lynch
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Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
pushing it over here for use by either another human or another bot, right? In my
case, that's very latency sensitive. And so, I would expect, and the way that Equinix is
looking at this is another technology stack that ties in really well with corporate
digital transformation in general, especially when companies are using a host of
cloud-based architectures, infrastructure as a service or software as a service.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
As you're getting more of these AI-oriented workloads or your power density is
increasing in general, talk about the metrics that you're presenting to investors now
versus maybe what you will be in the future to kind of capture how things are
evolving.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, sure. Right now, probably our the most important non-financial metric is Cabs
Billing, and actually, this last quarter, we have a lot of internal dialogue, because we
saw a flat Cabs Billing and that was a bit of a surprise to us and we went back and
started digging into it and one of the things that we are seeing is as we're churning
out older deployments, customer deployments in our data center, I'd call it 4 kVA
per cabinet, we're replacing that now with densities of 5 kVA to 7 kVA per cabinet.
You think a lot of that has to do with the underlying economics, but also the things
that they're but they're deploying overall are more power intensive and need to
interact more with networking year-over-year cloud providers over here, providers
over there. So, I would expect to see that density, that metric increase. I would expect
us as a company to go back and dig through that a little bit and try and figure out if
there are other APIs that we can use to enhance Cabs Billing.
Right now, we feel like it's by far the best metric to look at the business, because it
captures really not just the space and power that we charge for a cabinet, but it
includes interconnection, which is a huge part of our business, managed services,
and then any digital services that layer on so that we can kind of project out what the
yield potential is on a per cabinet basis to the investor base. But we're starting to
realize that that's -- it's a little more complex, there's more to the story than that, and
there's timing differences.
So, I would say there will be more to come on that. We're doing some internal --
trying to figure out what suite of KPIs and metrics we could add to enhance that
won't confuse or change meaningfully so that (Technical Difficulty).
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
(Technical Difficulty)
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Totally. Yes, you don't want to rush to it. Really, there was a bit of intrigue internally.
We're like, do we start disclosing that right as part of this earnings? Thankfully, folks
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like Katie Morgan on our team are like, let's slow down until we can test this and see
the trends and make sure it's operating the way we think it is or should.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Yes. You mentioned xScale. You have your first xScale facility here in the U.S. now in
Santa Clara. Maybe talk about what you see as the opportunity going forward to
expand that here in the U.S.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. Traditionally, our xScale strategy is focused on retail proximate facilities so that
hyperscalers in general can leverage the connectivity that they already have in our
data centers. Certainly, the last 12 months, I think the uptick in AI, although we had it
on the roadmap, but I think it's just moved forward at a pace that with ChatGPT's
launch and subsequent announcements is sort of quickening the pace a bit. So, we'll
continue to invest in that, I'll call it, strategy one type of deployment, because we
think where there is some level of compute that needs to be close to our data center,
we've built more -- we build two and economics are a little bit better, will help our
customers deploy there. But I think in the U.S. you're going to see us focus a little bit
more on those AI-driven type of opportunities, which are bigger in scale. Our
traditional xScale deployments are about 30 megawatts to 40 megawatts, and we
require that they're close to our retail data center so that we can leverage the
connectivity. I think when you look at us expanding on the xScale side to take
advantage of this AI opportunity, you're going to see us get further away in remote
locations, away from the high-density network, connective data centers and closer to
places with expansion opportunities on real estate.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
There's a lot of dry powder out there in the infrastructure world looking to be
deployed. What are you looking for in terms of a partner in the U.S. for the xScale?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, I think somebody that shares that vision and has the right connections that can
help (Technical Difficulty) we want to get to business. But more importantly,
somebody that's happy to let us lead the charge because we're certainly a leader in
this category, we've got the brand, we've got the customer connections. We build
and operate and support data centers, we think, better than anyone in the world. So,
somebody that's happy to take that lead and partner with us. The size and scale of
the investments that are going to be necessary are pretty big to your point, Brendan,
though there's money waiting to find a home.
And so, I mean, not much of a shortage of people lining up to talk to. It's really going
through that diligence process and finding that cultural fit, that operational fit.
Sometimes, purely financial investors, when you explain operational challenges, it's a
bit tough. And so, you want to partner with somebody that has at least an intuition
around what it takes to operate a business. Things rarely line up the way you put
them on a piece of paper, the way that you bottle things. And so, just working
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through that, finding a partner, where the cultural fit, where the strategic intent, the
time horizons for exits and additional funding requirements will match up.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
It sounds like from your previous xScale JVs, there were more -- you had a financial
partner on all of those. It sounds like in the U.S., you might have more partner that
has at least operating expertise --
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
I think we'll still lean more towards financial, but making sure we get that fit of
somebody that understands the operational nature.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Sure. In terms of going into the business of building these hyperscale facilities, I'd
argue that there's very strong demand right now, but there's arguably lower barriers
to entry, which compared to your interconnection hubs, we see relatively modest
cabinet additions over the past few quarters, but I would argue much higher barriers
to entry. How do you think about those risks and opportunities?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. Well, I look at it and monitor it on the retail side. I don't really worry about it
quite honestly, because we have such a defensible market position, like you said that
the cost is just like you cannot build a data center with 1,800 carriers in it overnight.
Attracting those carriers and then getting the people to come in, connect to those
carriers and consume services, I mean it takes 25 years, it really does. And minimally,
in a single market, it probably takes you at least 10 years. And so, being able to
sustain that type of ramp-up phase is very challenging for folks. While there is a lot of
money on the sideline, people, I think, still want to utilize debt to get there. And I
think the interest rate situation that we find ourselves in, and probably will here for a
bit of time more, is a slight barrier to entry.
I think the way we think about it is, look, we're the best builder and operator of data
centers on the planet. We've got a very strong brand. Once we nail down with our
customers, where they want to go, how they want to go, how they want to get there,
procure the lands, make sure that we've got the power allocated, we'll be ready to
rock. I think the thing that we have is that brand, the thing that we have is our
balance sheet to leverage. In the meantime, we still have a couple of turns of debt
before we make the rating agencies uncomfortable. We've got a healthy revolver. So
we have a ton of flexibility there, and I think our brand just gets an immense lead in
that category.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
The brand and the ecosystem, I think, are very much balanced.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
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Totally. It's a little bit different on the AI side, but if you become the place, where AI
gets done on the learning side and have a solid track record on inference, even
though they might be small deployments, it feels like that will be the place where AI
gets done in the future.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
In terms of the demand that you've been seeing, you alluded to it earlier, cabinet
positions have been relatively modest here today. I think they're only up about 0.5%
after growing some 25% over the past couple of years. I've heard Charles Meyers
describe 2023 as the year of optimization. Where are we in that process? Do you
think that could continue into 2024?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, that's a great question. I tell you, that is probably the two biggest questions
we've been asking ourselves internally as we're going through our planning season
right now. And I'll say, I think our bet is that things will maybe clear up a little bit
compared to '23, but there will still probably be a bit of volatility. I think Q1, for us,
will be a really important quarter, seeing how we perform against our pipeline will be
really interesting to me. I'm an accountant, so I always kind of think in terms of
planning cycles within a business and just knowing that most enterprises out there
are nailing down their budgets right now.
Once those budgets get pushed down to the functional leaders at the company,
they will have their authority to go spend starting in Q1 of next year. And you'll get a
really good sense of how those enterprises are planning internally when you see the
active discipline. I would say we're looking at things a bit cautiously for what's going
to happen, really interesting, I think shifts towards -- towards AI and we -- it may slow
down over the -- believe enterprises are in full pursuit of digital transformation. It just
might be a little bit lumpy around that.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Is it generally macro uncertainty?
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, I think so. People dealing with inflationary challenges out there, in our space
specifically, we had to absorb a really big inflationary hit last year on power. Don't
expect anything close to that magnitude this year, which is definitely going to be
helpful for us. It was a bit of a challenge to talk to people, and when you're pushing
out several hundred million in power price increases to your installed base, that
"Hey, can we sell you a new implementation as well?" I think that that will clear up a
little bit here in 2024, but there's still long lead times for customers outside of supply
chains. Inflation globally is still pretty high, especially outside of the U.S., and there's
a host of companies that may be, the announced actions that they were going to
take to cut costs within 2023 are probably going to -- some of that's going to extend
into 2024, action taking in support of those cuts.
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Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
A - Katie Morgan
A - Simon Miller
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
On the power front, maybe you could give us an update on where you are in terms
of hedging going into 2024, and also how you will be handling the power increases
that you have passed on already in an environment, where energy costs are
generally coming down.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. So, we'll give an update on how we're heading into '24, so I'll just refer you back
to Q3 on what we said there. But generally, where we can be hedged, we're fully
hedged. We think that, that's a benefit to our customers. And last year, when we
rolled out a ton of purchase -- excuse me, power increases to their bill, we had to
walk them through that, how we actually saved them money by being hedged come
into the year. The way that we do it is we kind of look out a couple of years, and we
put about four years of layering in there, so that we've always really just, cost
balancing the overall portfolio. Sometimes, favor like last year, sometimes it doesn't.
It's definitely in a time of increasing prices.
So, we're going into next year at least feeling like the volatility around that is better.
In some markets, we're expecting to see power increases in terms of prices. In
others, it's probably going to be pretty consistent, both with the investor base and
definitely with our customers, that we'll push that back down to them if we're seeing
material increases in pricing. And they're contractual in nature for us, or at least we
feel like we'll be able to sustain them for a period of time. So, some volatility, but a
little bit less. And where we can be hedged, we'll be fully hedged -- or close to fully
hedged there, that's for sure.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
When we look at your pricing year-to-date, it's up about 9%. You can just aggregate
what component of that is power-related versus just pushing price increases onto
the customer base. And any difficulty you might see doing that going forward, given
some of those budget constraints and some of that macro hesitancy that you're
seeing contributing to the relatively modest cabinet this year-to-date.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, gosh, I'll get back to you on the specific breakdown. It's a good portion of it.
Katie, do you know offhand by any chance?
{BIO 22743669 <GO>}
Yes. I think we can see (Technical Difficulty) roughly about 42 or 43 was the
underlying pricing adjustment, including the power price adjustment.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
That's right. Okay. So, about a third of that is related to power. And the good news
about how our contracts work is that we've been really -- we have a price escalator
built in, but they're not automatic. Historically, we've been very strategic about
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pushing those down. Where we're seeing real inflationary costs, we'll continue to
maximize whatever leverage we have against the agreement to push that down to
our customers. We will probably be a little bit more strategic, depending on the
reaction there, because we have that flexibility.
At the end of the day, like 90% of every dollar that we book each quarter comes
from an existing customer. We just have to be cautious about doing that. But we
have a ton of flexibility within our contracts to do it, anywhere from 3% to 5%. These
days, when we're locking in new agreements, we're putting or maximizing that
language as much as possible, and we're stepping people up to the, what I would
call, new post-inflationary rates, list prices that have been increased anywhere from,
like, 8% to maybe 12%, depending on the market.
So, we're going to have -- new deals are getting uplifted. When we go through
renewals, when we go through our annual PIs, we'll be very subjective. But we're
going to be very sensitive to what we're seeing out there with the customer base.
And again, I feel like this year will be an easier time to have that conversation,
because last year, you're hitting them with a contractual PI at the same time that
you're doing this big power PI. And so that just felt like a double punch. This year,
we'll feel like --
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Yes, I can imagine last year was a difficult conversation.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
It was, yeah.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
That was a pretty assertive price increase.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
I do, but I give our team full marks, because we started towards the middle of the
previous year and having conversations with customers. We sent them three
notifications telling them, here's the date that we're going to get back to you with
the range of your price increase, here's the date that we're going to come back to
you with a definite increase, trying to hit it at a time, where they would be able to
influence whatever budgetary decisions they were making back at their company.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Maybe one accounting question. If you can walk us through the variety of
maintenance CapEx costs that you have, which ones you consider operating
expenses versus recurring CapEx. And I suppose the genesis of the question is that
CPNE has grown at about 11% CAGR over the past six years, while recurring CapEx
has only grown about 5%. So, I suppose there's an element of you have some newer
facilities that are probably just operating more efficiently.
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A - Simon Miller
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes. That's correct, yes.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
But maybe there's a consideration that there's some catch-up in maintenance CapEx
coming in.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes -- no, we've got some facilities that are well over 20 years old. This is actually
something that's been on our mind for a few years now. Generally, when we go in
and do a big maintenance project, we put a lot of pressure on our design and
construction teams to release capacity, where we are able to release capacity and
live up to the standard of how we've defined AFFO in our earnings release. If we
create capacity for incremental revenue, not that means new revenue, we push that
into expansion CapEx. And that takes the shape of replacing crack units so that you
can provide more air flow to the white space, and therefore, distribute more power,
so you can take cabs off of engineering, right?
So, I may be -- after release after one maintenance project, released 300 cab data
center. Well, that's 300 cabs of incremental revenue and I'm actually going to get a
return on it. We'll put that into expansion. Where -- where we don't have that
opportunity, it's just traditional recurring CapEx. So, we've got it; as you mentioned,
we've got some big ones coming up. Putting a ton of pressure on the team to just
rethink how we might engage in replacing some of the bigger parts of that
infrastructure. Definitely around the air movers, black units, in some cases, power
distribution. The great news is we've got one of the best design and construction
teams, I think, in the business and they're coming up with very creative ways to not
only give us a surety that a critical data center is going to stay up and live and
relevant and meet our customers' demands, but actually improve on the efficiency
side, drive down PUE and get us to the digital capacity itself instead. For us, that's
affinity and what we're always trying to achieve.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Tall order, but --
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
It's a big one, but honestly, it's a great question, because we've been looking at this
for a couple of years now. This is not something that we've been sort of seeing this
coming for a while, started having a couple of just high-level conversations with the
team three years ago, but when it came to putting the actual plans on paper and
putting execution and (Technical Difficulty) around it, it happens, right? If you talk
about it enough and really explain to people why it's so important and show the
value that you can create and why, if you're an IDX operator, your project has a
higher likelihood of getting approved, but I'm just, being plain, then everybody gets
on board with it. We get some amazing solutions out of it. Quite honestly, we're up
to stuff right now that I just never -- I really didn't dream two years ago when we were
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Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity)
Page 12 of 12
Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
Q - Brendan Lynch
A - Simon Miller
kind of looking at this probably five, seven-year period of, I'd call it, I wouldn't call it
a refresh, but maintenance is probably a good word for it.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Great. Well, I look forward to seeing some of these developed in 2024.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Yes, absolutely.
{BIO 21237186 <GO>}
Thank you, Simon.
{BIO 1764376 <GO>}
Absolutely. Thank you, Brendan. Appreciate it.
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Equinix Inc Barclays Global Technlogy Conference December 2023.pdf

  • 1. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 1 of 12 , Senior Manager, Investor Relations and Sustainability , Chief Accounting Officer , Barclays Brendan Lynch Simon Miller Brendan Lynch Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch Barclays Global Technology Conference Company Participants Katie Morgan Simon Miller Other Participants Brendan Lynch Presentation {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brendan Lynch, I cover Communication Infrastructure here at Barclays. I'm joined today by Equinix's Chief Accounting Officer, Simon Miller. Simon, welcome. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Thank you. Appreciate it. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Forward-looking statements? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, absolutely. So, we'll be making some forward-looking statements today. So please refer to our SEC filings for the risk factors affecting our business. Questions And Answers {BIO 21237186 <GO>} (Question And Answer) Right. Maybe as a place to start, Equinix has, 20 years now, been enabling -- to execute on their digital transformation. Maybe you could just give us an update on where the average enterprise is in that process. Maybe any changes in all the states of evolution.
  • 2. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 2 of 12 A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. Really good question. And it's, as you can imagine, I'd say, it varies across the board. You've got your kind of folks operating on the edge that lean in early. They're probably a good portion of the way through it. I'd like to consider Equinix one of those companies we're going through our own ERP transformation right now, converting from Oracle On-Premises to Oracle Cloud. ERPs are a critical operational set of tools to operate the company. And what we found when we go through that type of transformation is that there's a host of ancillary application stacks that need to be converted as well, because they don't tie in from an on-prem basis to a cloud basis very well, and you don't get all of the feature and things. So, a company like us, we're only about halfway through that. I've got at least another year on that transformation just for the ERP, and then we're going to start to get to work on some of these other ancillary applications with that. There's probably some other real quick early adopters, smaller companies are going to be able to do it a lot quicker, but when you're talking about that broad swath of enterprises, it's probably going to be still five to eight-year kind of transformation that's going to take place for companies over the next several years. The big companies like S&P, Oracle, Microsoft, they're all going exclusively cloud in the future. So, if you're on-prem today, you're going to need to acquire some sort of cloud architecture solution in the future. I mean you're going to need to do it at a place like Equinix, quite obviously, where all of the other tools that support that transformation, all of those providers there within Equinix as well as the carriers that provide connectivity into those providers. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} A lot of progress, but still some room to run. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} I still feel like it's very early. I mean, for us, we had a few delays. There's just a lot of learning that goes into it. You're really moving from an architecture that has been in the market for the better part of 50 years. Ripping that -- a cloud solution is different, is what I would say. You don't customize anywhere near as much, but you have a lot more configuration capability. And I think going through the evolution, really looking at what do you do inside of your four walls and how do you have to do it differently, that was part of the process that I think we didn't fully appreciate going in, but that's a little bit of extra time as we move through the development phase. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Interesting that -- to hear that Equinix has to go -- {BIO 1764376 <GO>} I know, I actually wish Keith, our CFO, would talk about it a little bit more often, because we live it internally. But yes, no, we're drinking our own Kool-Aid internally, for sure, and utilizing our own resources (Technical Difficulty).
  • 3. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 3 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller {BIO 21237186 <GO>} It introduces the next wave of digital transformation, and AI is getting an enormous amount of attention. And a lot of companies are talking about how -- when they're asked about AI, they say, "Oh, we've been doing AI for years." And I think there's certainly some truth to that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about legacy AI applications, for lack of a better term, versus some of the AI demand that might be stemming from ChatGPT-oriented -- {BIO 1764376 <GO>} For sure {BIO 21237186 <GO>} -- hype demand over the last 12 months. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. And we have, like, we've had AI inside of our four walls for several years now. It's -- they're more niche applications. When you think about ChatGPT, that is a consumer-facing, large, massive (Technical Difficulty) but you've got a got various use cases for AI work, real-time AI analytics, doing something along the lines for an internal use application suite and enterprise that is very focused. That type of stuff has actually been around for the better part of four to five years, and certainly increasing. By the way, that's the type of stuff that is perfect inside of an Equinix data center because you're trying to crunch a ton of data like all of these works historically and process it all and get real-time answers. You're using a smaller data set that is very easy to provide compute right next to connectivity. That's the type of stuff that is getting launched and has been launched now. I think it's going to increase in size and volume as, as some of the bigger, I'd say tool and fast providers push AI alternative to the enterprise in a more, let's say, generalized fashion to be able, not to necessarily replace, but enhance a set of tools that they already have out there. That'll be another layer of complexity. And then there's, of course, the consumer facing kind of a big transformation point in generative AI application. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} And are you seeing any of that generative AI large language model demand yet, or that's still probably a few years out? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} We probably won't see that on the retail side of our business, but we're definitely getting a decent amount of inbound requests and discussions on the xScale side of our business. So, what you're describing, the large learning models or language models are much, much more compute focused. They need a high amount of density in terms of power. Generally, the deployers of that, if you're thinking about a hyperscaler, which is probably where they want to play mostly, they're looking for
  • 4. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 4 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller areas -- they don't need to be super close to network. So, they're looking for locations, where they have a ton of access to real estate expansion and power, because they want to build facilities that start at 200 megawatts, get as big as 500 megawatts, maybe as big as a gigawatt. They want access to the power, they want access to the power cheaply, they don't need to be around large city centers. It's a high-compute environment. Where that stuff eventually gets pushed into the inference model, where I think the -- pardon me, the opportunity for Equinix on the retail side of our business will start to expand. And we're starting to see a little bit of that, but again, it looks a little bit more like a niche, home-grown AI model that people are serving up for themselves. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Okay. I want to come back to xScale in a minute, but maybe just a few more on AI. You had some wins recently with CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, Crusoe, I think a few other AI startups as well. Can you just characterize the nature of that leasing? Is it a large footprint in a single facility? Is it distributed throughout the U.S., throughout the world? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, it's a couple locations, and really about leveraging our network nodes. It's that piece of delivering the inference out on the edge of the footprint as opposed to all of the compute that we've done on the backend. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} As you're building out into the AI realm, I think the positives would be that you're establishing a new ecosystem and kind of tapping into it as you did with the cloud for the past 15 years or so. Maybe on the negative side, it's an unproven business model. Talk about how you'd consider some of these risks and opportunities. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, it's definitely unproven, but I would say, boy, it does feel like cloud 2.0 all over again. And back in the day, we heard a lot of questions around our business model, whether the cloud was friend or foe. And at Equinix, we have just some of the best team thinkers on the technology side. And we really sat down and developed a -- how do we become the home of the cloud and develop a series of products to work with hyperscalers to create cloud on-prem, and blend that with our network connectivity to offer solutions to customers. AI feels like the same. It feels very similar. Once the inference engines get put to the enterprise or to the data center, the way we're looking at it is it's just another stack in that suite of applications that I was talking about as a business leader that I need to implement and have supported. We're thinking a lot about it as it being just another stack that companies are going to need to have highly interconnected talking to other sources of data in their architecture. If you think about, so I have a bit of AI in my world. It's mostly -- wouldn't call it fully generative, but those AI bots need to be proximate to where my data is, because it's grabbing data out of ERP, it's modifying it in some way and
  • 5. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 5 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller pushing it over here for use by either another human or another bot, right? In my case, that's very latency sensitive. And so, I would expect, and the way that Equinix is looking at this is another technology stack that ties in really well with corporate digital transformation in general, especially when companies are using a host of cloud-based architectures, infrastructure as a service or software as a service. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} As you're getting more of these AI-oriented workloads or your power density is increasing in general, talk about the metrics that you're presenting to investors now versus maybe what you will be in the future to kind of capture how things are evolving. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, sure. Right now, probably our the most important non-financial metric is Cabs Billing, and actually, this last quarter, we have a lot of internal dialogue, because we saw a flat Cabs Billing and that was a bit of a surprise to us and we went back and started digging into it and one of the things that we are seeing is as we're churning out older deployments, customer deployments in our data center, I'd call it 4 kVA per cabinet, we're replacing that now with densities of 5 kVA to 7 kVA per cabinet. You think a lot of that has to do with the underlying economics, but also the things that they're but they're deploying overall are more power intensive and need to interact more with networking year-over-year cloud providers over here, providers over there. So, I would expect to see that density, that metric increase. I would expect us as a company to go back and dig through that a little bit and try and figure out if there are other APIs that we can use to enhance Cabs Billing. Right now, we feel like it's by far the best metric to look at the business, because it captures really not just the space and power that we charge for a cabinet, but it includes interconnection, which is a huge part of our business, managed services, and then any digital services that layer on so that we can kind of project out what the yield potential is on a per cabinet basis to the investor base. But we're starting to realize that that's -- it's a little more complex, there's more to the story than that, and there's timing differences. So, I would say there will be more to come on that. We're doing some internal -- trying to figure out what suite of KPIs and metrics we could add to enhance that won't confuse or change meaningfully so that (Technical Difficulty). {BIO 21237186 <GO>} (Technical Difficulty) {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Totally. Yes, you don't want to rush to it. Really, there was a bit of intrigue internally. We're like, do we start disclosing that right as part of this earnings? Thankfully, folks
  • 6. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 6 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller like Katie Morgan on our team are like, let's slow down until we can test this and see the trends and make sure it's operating the way we think it is or should. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Yes. You mentioned xScale. You have your first xScale facility here in the U.S. now in Santa Clara. Maybe talk about what you see as the opportunity going forward to expand that here in the U.S. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. Traditionally, our xScale strategy is focused on retail proximate facilities so that hyperscalers in general can leverage the connectivity that they already have in our data centers. Certainly, the last 12 months, I think the uptick in AI, although we had it on the roadmap, but I think it's just moved forward at a pace that with ChatGPT's launch and subsequent announcements is sort of quickening the pace a bit. So, we'll continue to invest in that, I'll call it, strategy one type of deployment, because we think where there is some level of compute that needs to be close to our data center, we've built more -- we build two and economics are a little bit better, will help our customers deploy there. But I think in the U.S. you're going to see us focus a little bit more on those AI-driven type of opportunities, which are bigger in scale. Our traditional xScale deployments are about 30 megawatts to 40 megawatts, and we require that they're close to our retail data center so that we can leverage the connectivity. I think when you look at us expanding on the xScale side to take advantage of this AI opportunity, you're going to see us get further away in remote locations, away from the high-density network, connective data centers and closer to places with expansion opportunities on real estate. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} There's a lot of dry powder out there in the infrastructure world looking to be deployed. What are you looking for in terms of a partner in the U.S. for the xScale? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, I think somebody that shares that vision and has the right connections that can help (Technical Difficulty) we want to get to business. But more importantly, somebody that's happy to let us lead the charge because we're certainly a leader in this category, we've got the brand, we've got the customer connections. We build and operate and support data centers, we think, better than anyone in the world. So, somebody that's happy to take that lead and partner with us. The size and scale of the investments that are going to be necessary are pretty big to your point, Brendan, though there's money waiting to find a home. And so, I mean, not much of a shortage of people lining up to talk to. It's really going through that diligence process and finding that cultural fit, that operational fit. Sometimes, purely financial investors, when you explain operational challenges, it's a bit tough. And so, you want to partner with somebody that has at least an intuition around what it takes to operate a business. Things rarely line up the way you put them on a piece of paper, the way that you bottle things. And so, just working
  • 7. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 7 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller through that, finding a partner, where the cultural fit, where the strategic intent, the time horizons for exits and additional funding requirements will match up. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} It sounds like from your previous xScale JVs, there were more -- you had a financial partner on all of those. It sounds like in the U.S., you might have more partner that has at least operating expertise -- {BIO 1764376 <GO>} I think we'll still lean more towards financial, but making sure we get that fit of somebody that understands the operational nature. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Sure. In terms of going into the business of building these hyperscale facilities, I'd argue that there's very strong demand right now, but there's arguably lower barriers to entry, which compared to your interconnection hubs, we see relatively modest cabinet additions over the past few quarters, but I would argue much higher barriers to entry. How do you think about those risks and opportunities? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. Well, I look at it and monitor it on the retail side. I don't really worry about it quite honestly, because we have such a defensible market position, like you said that the cost is just like you cannot build a data center with 1,800 carriers in it overnight. Attracting those carriers and then getting the people to come in, connect to those carriers and consume services, I mean it takes 25 years, it really does. And minimally, in a single market, it probably takes you at least 10 years. And so, being able to sustain that type of ramp-up phase is very challenging for folks. While there is a lot of money on the sideline, people, I think, still want to utilize debt to get there. And I think the interest rate situation that we find ourselves in, and probably will here for a bit of time more, is a slight barrier to entry. I think the way we think about it is, look, we're the best builder and operator of data centers on the planet. We've got a very strong brand. Once we nail down with our customers, where they want to go, how they want to go, how they want to get there, procure the lands, make sure that we've got the power allocated, we'll be ready to rock. I think the thing that we have is that brand, the thing that we have is our balance sheet to leverage. In the meantime, we still have a couple of turns of debt before we make the rating agencies uncomfortable. We've got a healthy revolver. So we have a ton of flexibility there, and I think our brand just gets an immense lead in that category. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} The brand and the ecosystem, I think, are very much balanced. {BIO 1764376 <GO>}
  • 8. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 8 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Totally. It's a little bit different on the AI side, but if you become the place, where AI gets done on the learning side and have a solid track record on inference, even though they might be small deployments, it feels like that will be the place where AI gets done in the future. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} In terms of the demand that you've been seeing, you alluded to it earlier, cabinet positions have been relatively modest here today. I think they're only up about 0.5% after growing some 25% over the past couple of years. I've heard Charles Meyers describe 2023 as the year of optimization. Where are we in that process? Do you think that could continue into 2024? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, that's a great question. I tell you, that is probably the two biggest questions we've been asking ourselves internally as we're going through our planning season right now. And I'll say, I think our bet is that things will maybe clear up a little bit compared to '23, but there will still probably be a bit of volatility. I think Q1, for us, will be a really important quarter, seeing how we perform against our pipeline will be really interesting to me. I'm an accountant, so I always kind of think in terms of planning cycles within a business and just knowing that most enterprises out there are nailing down their budgets right now. Once those budgets get pushed down to the functional leaders at the company, they will have their authority to go spend starting in Q1 of next year. And you'll get a really good sense of how those enterprises are planning internally when you see the active discipline. I would say we're looking at things a bit cautiously for what's going to happen, really interesting, I think shifts towards -- towards AI and we -- it may slow down over the -- believe enterprises are in full pursuit of digital transformation. It just might be a little bit lumpy around that. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Is it generally macro uncertainty? {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, I think so. People dealing with inflationary challenges out there, in our space specifically, we had to absorb a really big inflationary hit last year on power. Don't expect anything close to that magnitude this year, which is definitely going to be helpful for us. It was a bit of a challenge to talk to people, and when you're pushing out several hundred million in power price increases to your installed base, that "Hey, can we sell you a new implementation as well?" I think that that will clear up a little bit here in 2024, but there's still long lead times for customers outside of supply chains. Inflation globally is still pretty high, especially outside of the U.S., and there's a host of companies that may be, the announced actions that they were going to take to cut costs within 2023 are probably going to -- some of that's going to extend into 2024, action taking in support of those cuts.
  • 9. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 9 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller A - Katie Morgan A - Simon Miller {BIO 21237186 <GO>} On the power front, maybe you could give us an update on where you are in terms of hedging going into 2024, and also how you will be handling the power increases that you have passed on already in an environment, where energy costs are generally coming down. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. So, we'll give an update on how we're heading into '24, so I'll just refer you back to Q3 on what we said there. But generally, where we can be hedged, we're fully hedged. We think that, that's a benefit to our customers. And last year, when we rolled out a ton of purchase -- excuse me, power increases to their bill, we had to walk them through that, how we actually saved them money by being hedged come into the year. The way that we do it is we kind of look out a couple of years, and we put about four years of layering in there, so that we've always really just, cost balancing the overall portfolio. Sometimes, favor like last year, sometimes it doesn't. It's definitely in a time of increasing prices. So, we're going into next year at least feeling like the volatility around that is better. In some markets, we're expecting to see power increases in terms of prices. In others, it's probably going to be pretty consistent, both with the investor base and definitely with our customers, that we'll push that back down to them if we're seeing material increases in pricing. And they're contractual in nature for us, or at least we feel like we'll be able to sustain them for a period of time. So, some volatility, but a little bit less. And where we can be hedged, we'll be fully hedged -- or close to fully hedged there, that's for sure. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} When we look at your pricing year-to-date, it's up about 9%. You can just aggregate what component of that is power-related versus just pushing price increases onto the customer base. And any difficulty you might see doing that going forward, given some of those budget constraints and some of that macro hesitancy that you're seeing contributing to the relatively modest cabinet this year-to-date. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, gosh, I'll get back to you on the specific breakdown. It's a good portion of it. Katie, do you know offhand by any chance? {BIO 22743669 <GO>} Yes. I think we can see (Technical Difficulty) roughly about 42 or 43 was the underlying pricing adjustment, including the power price adjustment. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} That's right. Okay. So, about a third of that is related to power. And the good news about how our contracts work is that we've been really -- we have a price escalator built in, but they're not automatic. Historically, we've been very strategic about
  • 10. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 10 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch pushing those down. Where we're seeing real inflationary costs, we'll continue to maximize whatever leverage we have against the agreement to push that down to our customers. We will probably be a little bit more strategic, depending on the reaction there, because we have that flexibility. At the end of the day, like 90% of every dollar that we book each quarter comes from an existing customer. We just have to be cautious about doing that. But we have a ton of flexibility within our contracts to do it, anywhere from 3% to 5%. These days, when we're locking in new agreements, we're putting or maximizing that language as much as possible, and we're stepping people up to the, what I would call, new post-inflationary rates, list prices that have been increased anywhere from, like, 8% to maybe 12%, depending on the market. So, we're going to have -- new deals are getting uplifted. When we go through renewals, when we go through our annual PIs, we'll be very subjective. But we're going to be very sensitive to what we're seeing out there with the customer base. And again, I feel like this year will be an easier time to have that conversation, because last year, you're hitting them with a contractual PI at the same time that you're doing this big power PI. And so that just felt like a double punch. This year, we'll feel like -- {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Yes, I can imagine last year was a difficult conversation. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} It was, yeah. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} That was a pretty assertive price increase. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} I do, but I give our team full marks, because we started towards the middle of the previous year and having conversations with customers. We sent them three notifications telling them, here's the date that we're going to get back to you with the range of your price increase, here's the date that we're going to come back to you with a definite increase, trying to hit it at a time, where they would be able to influence whatever budgetary decisions they were making back at their company. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Maybe one accounting question. If you can walk us through the variety of maintenance CapEx costs that you have, which ones you consider operating expenses versus recurring CapEx. And I suppose the genesis of the question is that CPNE has grown at about 11% CAGR over the past six years, while recurring CapEx has only grown about 5%. So, I suppose there's an element of you have some newer facilities that are probably just operating more efficiently.
  • 11. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 11 of 12 A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes. That's correct, yes. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} But maybe there's a consideration that there's some catch-up in maintenance CapEx coming in. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes -- no, we've got some facilities that are well over 20 years old. This is actually something that's been on our mind for a few years now. Generally, when we go in and do a big maintenance project, we put a lot of pressure on our design and construction teams to release capacity, where we are able to release capacity and live up to the standard of how we've defined AFFO in our earnings release. If we create capacity for incremental revenue, not that means new revenue, we push that into expansion CapEx. And that takes the shape of replacing crack units so that you can provide more air flow to the white space, and therefore, distribute more power, so you can take cabs off of engineering, right? So, I may be -- after release after one maintenance project, released 300 cab data center. Well, that's 300 cabs of incremental revenue and I'm actually going to get a return on it. We'll put that into expansion. Where -- where we don't have that opportunity, it's just traditional recurring CapEx. So, we've got it; as you mentioned, we've got some big ones coming up. Putting a ton of pressure on the team to just rethink how we might engage in replacing some of the bigger parts of that infrastructure. Definitely around the air movers, black units, in some cases, power distribution. The great news is we've got one of the best design and construction teams, I think, in the business and they're coming up with very creative ways to not only give us a surety that a critical data center is going to stay up and live and relevant and meet our customers' demands, but actually improve on the efficiency side, drive down PUE and get us to the digital capacity itself instead. For us, that's affinity and what we're always trying to achieve. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Tall order, but -- {BIO 1764376 <GO>} It's a big one, but honestly, it's a great question, because we've been looking at this for a couple of years now. This is not something that we've been sort of seeing this coming for a while, started having a couple of just high-level conversations with the team three years ago, but when it came to putting the actual plans on paper and putting execution and (Technical Difficulty) around it, it happens, right? If you talk about it enough and really explain to people why it's so important and show the value that you can create and why, if you're an IDX operator, your project has a higher likelihood of getting approved, but I'm just, being plain, then everybody gets on board with it. We get some amazing solutions out of it. Quite honestly, we're up to stuff right now that I just never -- I really didn't dream two years ago when we were
  • 12. FINAL TRANSCRIPT 2023-12-06 Equinix Inc (EQIX US Equity) Page 12 of 12 Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller Q - Brendan Lynch A - Simon Miller kind of looking at this probably five, seven-year period of, I'd call it, I wouldn't call it a refresh, but maintenance is probably a good word for it. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Great. Well, I look forward to seeing some of these developed in 2024. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Yes, absolutely. {BIO 21237186 <GO>} Thank you, Simon. {BIO 1764376 <GO>} Absolutely. Thank you, Brendan. Appreciate it. This transcript may not be 100 percent accurate and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies. This transcript is provided "as is", without express or implied warranties of any kind. Bloomberg retains all rights to this transcript and provides it solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Bloomberg, its suppliers and third- party agents shall have no liability for errors in this transcript or for lost profits, losses, or direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive damages in connection with the furnishing, performance or use of such transcript. Neither the information nor any opinion expressed in this transcript constitutes a solicitation of the purchase or sale of securities or commodities. Any opinion expressed in the transcript does not necessarily reflect the views of Bloomberg LP. © COPYRIGHT 2024, BLOOMBERG LP. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, redistribution or retransmission is expressly prohibited.