Equinix expands Hong Kong footprint to meet demand

Equinix is expanding its Hong Kong footprint to accommodate local interconnection needs and increasing numbers of inbound cloud service providers.

This latest expansion of Equinix’s Hong Kong footprint adds over 1,400 new cabinets and brings the company’s total investment in the city to over $250 million.

The expansion in Hong Kong includes 515 new cabinets in HK1 and represents an incremental investment of $16 million and adds 900 new cabinets in HK2 and represents an incremental investment of $39 million. It is the latest in a series of expansions across Asia-Pacific to meet the rising demand for interconnection services, with other recent expansions including Melbourne, Tokyo and Sydney.

The new development will enable Equinix to support the growing needs of an increasing variety of enterprises – such as FSI and FinTech, e-payments and logistics – to interconnect with cloud and technology providers.

Equinix’s cloud and IT ecosystem has continued to gain momentum in Hong Kong. Its cloud customer-base has grown significantly since 2014, as local and international internet security and CSPs are increasingly choosing to deploy with Equinix Hong Kong as their initial entry point or hub location for the Asia-Pacific region.

Major cloud service providers in Equinix Hong Kong now include Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, Microsoft Azure & Office 365 and Google Cloud. According to Cisco, global cloud IP traffic will almost quadruple in over the next 5 years, this expansion will enable Equinix to meet the needs of Hong Kong customers looking to take advantage of this growth.

One Hong Kong customer taking advantage of Equinix’s increased capability is ClusterTech Limited, which specializes in using cloud, high performance computing and big data technologies to solve challenging technical problems and improve operational efficiency for their customers. The company is in the process of adding more resources within Equinix’s IBX data centers to launch a new solution that will enable environmental engineering companies to run complex simulation applications.

In addition to supporting the core cloud needs of customers, Equinix is now also in an excellent position to accommodate the growing trend towards multi-cloud convergence and “interconnected commerce” that Equinix experts predict will be a key feature of the IT landscape over the coming year.

The additional capacity comes online at a time when Equinix is predicting IoT will become a concrete reality – evolving from independent, single-vendor solutions to those that talk to each other and rely on the same data.

With the Hong Kong expansion, Equinix will relieve the growing pressure on corporate-centric networks by distributing the traffic more broadly, as well as better control the performance of the streaming IoT information for more real-time business and operational insight.