With us Equinix and CEO Adaire Fox-Martin. This session is for Citi clients only. Disclosures have been made available at the corporate access desk. Ask a question, you can raise your hand or go to liveqa.com and enter code GPC26 to submit questions. Adaire, we'll turn it over to you to introduce your company and team, provide any opening remarks, tell the audience the top reasons an investor should buy your stock today, and then we'll get into Q&A.
Thank you so much. Do I press a button or is it already on?
I think it needs to be to red. There we go.
Got you. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us so early this morning. Thank you to Citi for giving us the opportunity. I'm joined by Phillip Konieczny here, who's our SVP for Finance. Our treasury function and our IR function report into Phillip, together we look forward to addressing your questions today.
Can I read the disclosure?
I will have Phillip read that disclosure. Thank you.
Am I on? Am I on here?
Yes.
Okay. Some of what we will talk about today contains forward-looking statements. Please read our SEC filings for more information about factors that could affect these statements. I'll turn it back to Adair.
To Adaire now.
The top reasons for buying Equinix stock. I mean, maybe let me just do this. I'll just lay out four reasons, and then I'll come back and drill into each one and see how that lands. You know, first, the demand for infrastructure is absolutely surging, and Equinix is at the center of that demand. Second, Equinix provides an essential layer of connectivity. Thirdly, we're building as the backbone of AI inference economy. Fourthly, we're executing exceptionally well against the opportunity. Maybe let me just go back and drill a little in each of those. First of all, the demand for infrastructure is absolutely surging.
Customers are asking us the same questions that probably many of your companies are asking around how they can differentiate their business models, their business process, their business outcome with AI as an enabler of those process changes. That question then leads to considerations about the infrastructure that will be necessary to support that, and there's no doubt that that infrastructure is much more complex and much more distributed than it has ever been before, and this plays directly to a core strength of Equinix. Our infrastructure demand element is a key factor in driving the growth scenario that we're experiencing today.
Second, Equinix is the essential layer of connectivity. We are very much the neutral ground where AI, cloud, and networking requirements converge. We enable enterprises to connect and to extract real business value, and there are reasons why that is so. First of all, there are advantages that Equinix has built over decades. We have the market-leading number of cloud on-ramps. We are a global organization with presence in many critical metros. We have the broadest enterprise customer base in the segment, and more than half a million business-to-business interconnections that are active today. We are that essential layer of connectivity. These are our core strengths, and we will continue to build and evolve on them.
In the Q4 that just passed, we saw the role that AI has in driving our business momentum. 60% of our largest deals in our Q4 portfolio could be attributed to AI workloads. Interestingly, of that 60%, 50% of those were led by enterprises, so companies in the retail, financial services, healthcare, and media sectors making use of Equinix to deploy their AI workloads. We also saw an uptick in our liquid cooling sales during Q4. We had 11 sales of liquid cooling during Q4, and five of those 11, interestingly, went into New York campus to support financial services.
We're certainly supporting, you know, the ability to land these workloads in an agentic world where we're supporting it with network diversity, with cloud proximity, with AI-ready interconnection, and with the latency that these workloads require. Location and density do matter. This is something that is important to us. Our platform continues to excel as every connection adds to the platform. Finally, strong top and bottom line growth. We're very much focused on delivering shareholder value. We do that through very disciplined execution. We focus on doing the important things well, on serving our customers so that we generate the highest return, and that we deliver the AFFO per share that our shareholders would like to see and expect from us.
Four elements that we think are reasons underpinning why our stock is a good buy today: demand for the infrastructure, Equinix as this essential layer of connectivity, the backbone of the inference economy, and very strong top and bottom line deliverables underpinned by excellent execution from the team over the last quarter.
Adair, thank you for that. Maybe jumping in on some of what you were describing, just from a high level, when you look at the business, what are the metrics that give you and the management team confidence in the durability of this retail-centric strategy, you know, given rising power density needs, you know, for IT infrastructure and as the hyperscalers are expanding their offerings to go after the same customers?
I think that, there are a number of signals around our KPIs that indicate the durable nature of the demand, and also, I guess, the role that Equinix uniquely plays in fulfilling that demand for our customers. First of all, I think you can see it in, you know, the bookings performance in Q4. And I would say actually throughout the second half of last year, but particularly in Q4. We had a very, very strong bookings performance, delivering $474 million of annualized gross bookings. I think it's less about the actual dollar numbers, although that represents a significant growth on a year-on-year basis and on a quarter-on-quarter basis, but more about the sheer number of transactions that underpinned that number.
We did more than 3,400 transactions with over 4,600 unique customers. In our model, we are very diversified. We're very diversified across segments, we're very diversified across industries, and we're very diversified across the workloads that we support from our customer base. I would say one of the first leading indicators of the durability of the model is the bookings, because bookings subsequently turns into revenue within that 90-day period. The second indicator is our pipeline execution and our pipeline discipline, how we are managing to come into every quarter with a highly qualified pipeline of opportunities, which means that our conversion rate in situ, in quarter, is particularly high.
This is nothing other than relentless discipline, and I think that the teams have been doing an amazing job looking at how we navigate our pipeline, but also how we navigate the opportunities that are there to the best location for that opportunity. Today, we're in a supply-demand environment that is very favorable to Equinix. And quite often, we find ourselves in a situation where we may have eight or nine customers who want the same piece of capacity in a particular location, in a particular metro. We work now to ensure that through a rubric mechanism, we identify the customer that we will work with to actually implement into that capacity, but that doesn't mean we tell the other eight to go away.
We work with the other eight to demand shape the workloads into capacity that is available in our footprint. And that has been something that has been very beneficial, both in terms of long-term customer relationship, but also in maximizing the use of our capacity. Bookings, pipeline, certainly a second measure, and then I would say the third from a top-line perspective is how we are managing churn. When we look at our churn, we're at the lower end of the range that we've guided to. We guide to 2%-2.5% churn. In Q4, we are at the lower end of that range, and a number of reasons for that internally.
One, some new predictive capability that we built ourselves with AI to have a look at our customer base and define our customers into segments that we define as ATR, available to renew. We know well in advance when a customer is up for renewal. Reconfiguring our customer success motion in order to have them focused on upsell and cross-sell opportunities and making those phone calls early, and we've started to see that have an impact on churn because obviously keeping a customer means that the revenue continues rather than there being a gap in revenue when you implement a new customer into those environments.
I think those are some of the top, some of the top-line measures that we're looking at in terms of growing our business. Obviously, we're very focused on our operational efficiency and effectiveness. How we utilize our power is a key component of that, and that's something that we have done very well. You know, we have had a tailwind because power prices have come down, surprisingly enough, given the narrative around energy over the past period of time, and that is something that obviously falls straight to our bottom line.
Very helpful. You know, if we could also double-click on your comments around the bookings. We think of Equinix as a very well-established company, been operating now for 27 years, and you delivered 42% bookings growth in the fourth quarter after building momentum, you know, through 2025. Can you discuss, as an organization, what has to come together to deliver that type of bookings result? Maybe give us a little preview of what that means also for the sales capability of your organization as you look forward.
Sure. I think there are a few factors. First of all, we have a significant presence in all major metros as it relates to sales execution. We, you know, we have almost 700 quota carriers across our business who operate across the 10,000+ customers that today are our customer base. When we open capacity in a new metro, we're not necessarily increasing our sales costs in order to prosecute that new capacity because it's already embedded in our metros and embedded in our team.
First of all, you know, we have a very focused sales force who have targets that they are, you know, obviously set to meet, processes that support them in doing that, systems that support them in doing that, and looking as always for the opportunity to make that whole process as effective and as efficient as we can so that we convert as many opportunities as possible. I think another important measure of our success last year was our ability to accelerate capacity into the 2026 window, the 2025–2026 window. Our design and construction team at any one time will have 50+ projects, 50+ major projects underway around the world.
Our team were tasked with releasing more capacity into the sales force for the sales force to be able to execute against that. They accelerated 30% of the retail capacity last year. They did that through a number of different techniques, but essentially it resulted in a, you know, acceleration of 30% of capacity. Now there's still some window to do some of that as we move into this year, but, you know, that will become a lever that you can only pull so many times once you've looked at your project processes. I will say that our design and our construction team are generally accelerating builds and delivering capacity faster.
That was also a, you know, a factor that enabled us to have the bookings that we enjoyed in Q4. I think since we opened the visibility of bookings, you know, to our investors, we did that in June, you can see that, you know, bookings are ticking up and moving to the left, or beg your pardon, moving to the right. You know, we hope that we're in a position with our pipeline to at least be able to continue that trajectory because certainly the demand in the market is there. I would say that bookings can also be variable, you know, from a seasonality point of view and so on.
One of the things that we've done is try to iron out seasonality across our year and to have the teams really focus on Q1 and Q2 as two quarters that build in current year, MRR for the current year, which is obviously how we're judged, and then three and four, two quarters that then set us up beautifully to exit into the next year. My team don't call Q1 , Q1, they call it Q5, so that we continue to build on the momentum that we had last quarter. Thanks.
Yeah, maybe just to add one other thing. I think another motion that's relatively new for us is because of the capacity that we've been able to pull forward is what we call kind of a pre-selling motion. So we've opened up the window with which our sales team is allowed to sell into new IBXs that are gonna be coming online. That used to be, if you were to ask me, you know, five years ago, that would have been about a three-month window. Three months before a site's gonna go live, sales will be able to sell into that.
Now we've extended that out to about 12 months. So we've talked about a pre-sales balance that we have of $170 million, which sits on top of the bookings. The way to think about that is that will turn into bookings in the future periods. We're able to de-risk some of this, capacity that's coming online for us in the future, quarters as well.
For example, Mike, in Q1 at our earnings call, we indicated that at the time of earnings, at the time of our earnings call, we'd already closed 45% of our Q1 pipeline, and we had $100 million in presale, at the time of earnings.
That's on top of the $170 million that you started with.
Just as we think about efficiencies internally for the company, how are you thinking about the opportunity from AI deployment internally? You know, how are you thinking about build versus partner versus buy in those solutions and opportunities?
Probably like every other company, you know, looking at it through the lens of how does this help us be accretive to our core measure. You know, there are certainly some things that we would buy, but there are areas of our business where we have, we believe, a unique approach, and that process differentiates us and enables us, you know, to execute in an extrapolated way around certain topics. I'll give you for example. We have, you know, built AI capabilities into our capacity visualization, which is, you know, something that is quite challenging to manage in a retail colocation facility.
Remember, we have hundreds of customers sitting across our various different data centers, and in many cases, you're managing your capacity a little bit like a Tetris block. One customer may take this small piece here, and another customer a small piece here, and then you have to look at the capacity that's available in that location and see how you best configure that in order to make that available for a customer. Making that visible to our sales team, you know, through the lens of AI and being able to look at, you know, you know, in real time potential configurations of that available capacity is something that's been highly valuable.
You know, just providing a single source, enabling us to work with customers across regions, across geographies, just one example of where we've self-built. We've also self-built an AI capability around our cage configuration. We collect 1 TB of data a day. It's incredible to think of the data that we collect and have available every day. When we look at our customers, they're often in more than one location with us. So we know already from engaging with them, pieces of how they like to make use of Equinix and what kind of configuration they like to have in Equinix.
Rather than start with a blank sheet of paper, we start with a twin. Based on all the data of their previous implementations, we can now say things where we visually build this cage. We can say to the customer, "Hey, you always have the camera in the top left corner. Is that where you want it in this cage?" Then we just place the virtual digital camera in that environment, regenerate the cage specs again. By the time that we get to closing that transaction, we're very close to understanding what actually has to be implemented.
It just passes across, which means that we reduce the timeframe between booking and billing, which means then that we can get faster to MRR. Lots of examples of where we're using this also on our construction side too.
Thanks. For our last 15 minutes, I'm gonna give a little preview of the topics that we're hoping to hit, and then if there's any other questions or topics that, you know, our group here wants to hit, please, you know, raise your hand or use the system. Real quick, we'll talk about AI inference, the financial guidance, xScale, enterprise a little more, and atNorth, which was recently announced. Maybe first moving over to or staying on this whole theme of AI, can you describe a little bit more from a customer perspective what you're seeing in terms of the uptake of the inference models?
What are the milestones that investors should be looking for as, you know, they try to gauge the timing and magnitude of benefit for Equinix, including what enterprises could contribute to this?
You know, first of all, we have the privilege of spending a lot of time with our customers. I meet a lot of customers, you know, every single week in different parts of the world from different industries. You get a lot of anecdotal information around our customers' use of this tech, you know, based on those meetings, those conversations, and the work that our technical teams are doing with our customers. I would say that we are, like, very early days really in this.
If you think about your own company, probably like I've just described, you know, many of you are making the move from proof of concepts that have demonstrated some business value to the implementation of a solution, you know, in real production environment. The vast majority of companies are no different to the kind of journey that you and your own companies are on. I think it's very early to, you know, specifically call milestones at this point. You know, there's no doubt in our minds that the demand is extremely sustainable and that we will see this continue to augment, you know, the broad base of workloads that we support in our data center environments.
I think, you know, that 60% figure is an important indicator, but that was of our top deals. Today, we are working on systems to enable us to capture that information all the way through the segments of transactions that we capture, and I guess we'll get better to let me when we achieve that. Today it is early to call specific milestones, I think, but we can absolutely see architectural and infrastructure discussions, I mean, that take into consideration things like the fact that most customers will be multi-cloud. Most customers, particularly if they're regulated, will maintain a part of their data either with us, usually with us, or behind their own firewall.
Most customers will have complex requirements when it comes to managing a, you know, the underpinning network and the connectivity that an agentic workload may require. Data gravity and access to your customers are key components of being successful here, and I think these are all elements that play to the Equinix value proposition.
Moving on to the financial guidance. Just given the bookings momentum that you were describing earlier, you know, what are the opportunities to grow recurring revenue at the upper half of the range or better? You know, maybe also it's an opportunity just to bridge how the AFFO per share growth outlook has evolved from back from the Analyst Day, which is, you know, mid-single digits. Now you're in upper single digit territory.
Yeah. I think there are probably three reasons why you see a difference between now and Analyst Day, and then perhaps I'll give Phil to drill in with a degree of specificity. You know, first of all, our bookings performance, our top-line performance was better than we expected in the second half, and I think we have, you know, specifically as we ended the year, and I think we have built momentum and muscle memory into the system around that bookings performance.
Secondly, from a capital perspective, we were able to raise at a lower cost than we had initially envisaged at Analyst Day. We also were able to utilize that capital very efficiently and capitalize it. That, also, I guess, was, a, you know, a second reason why you would see a difference in terms of where we are, and I'm completely having a blank on the third.
The third.
The third. Thank you. The third was the capacity that we were able to accelerate into the year, which I have already mentioned to you. I think those are, you know, some of the differences between where we were on Analyst Day in June and where we are now. We're very pleased with that performance and very pleased with the momentum that we see in the business. You know, working to ensure that we continue to drive for value creation and that we continue to drive, you know, as hard as we can towards the top end of that range that we guided to.
Yeah. Maybe just to add on a little bit just on some of the numbers specifically. On the AFFO per share guidance that we gave of 8%-10% for the year, so at 9% at the midpoint, that does include 100 basis points of benefit from just the timing of a transaction moving from Q4 to Q1, so we want to make sure we normalize for that. It is still, I think to your point, Mike, you know, 300 basis points of improvement relative to what we saw last summer, all to the reasons that Adair kind of just pointed out and why, what's driving that. We feel really good about the momentum there.
I guess just one last point that I would make around when you think about the underlying performance of the business, obviously it all drops, you know, to the bottom line around AFFO per share. Really one area to continue to focus on is our MRR growth, our recurring revenue growth, which really talks about the underlying fundamentals of the business. Again, we've seen incredibly strong momentum around that in 2025, and that's obviously extending into 2026. That's the key, one of the other key metrics I think to focus on as we go through the year.
We have a handful of questions that are coming in through live QA, so we'll make sure to get to those. One of them is, are you comfortable with the return and control, you give to capital partners at xScale? Will you adjust that in the future?
Sorry, can you repeat the first bit? I didn't catch that.
Sure. Sure. It said, are you comfortable with the return and control you give to capital partners at xScale, and will you adjust that in the future?
I think our partnership with our xScale partners is working exceptionally well. You know, we continue to evolve and grow our xScale portfolio with their support. No, I don't see that changing in the short term or medium term.
With xScale, you know, maybe one other question is just an update on the pipeline that you're seeing for xScale and the regional expansion opportunities beyond the Hampton facility, which I think Equinix has described in the past as expecting to lease up during this calendar year.
Yep. We have a, we have a very strong pipeline, for our xScale opportunities. you know, it's a model that allows us to serve a very strategic set of customers. It's also important to remember that many of those customers also have a very strong position, in our retail footprint. That, you know, that joint adjacency between xScale and retail, is a value add both for them and also for the broader customer base who require cloud adjacency for their workloads.
I was just gonna say that, you know, you've seen some of the land acquisitions that we talked about last year that we've done. You know, some of those we anticipate will be contributed to the xScale franchise, you know, here in the U.S. I think it also points to, you know, we've got ambitions to do more in EMEA and APAC as well with our xScale business, and some of what we've talked about that we have acquired, we anticipate standing up additional JVs in those theaters as well.
Can you discuss how you look at the TAM expansion opportunity from going after, you know, what I think are described as more mid-sized deployments from your enterprise customers, and maybe dovetailing into the atNorth announcement, how does that play into your enterprise strategy? And maybe just help people understand how to frame that in the broader portfolio in xScale.
Okay.
The session will end in five minutes.
You know, when we look at our enterprise TAM, I think what you're referring to there, Mike, is that our customers are certainly asking us for larger footprints than we have been previously asked for in the past. This is something that we factor into our acquisition strategy, both our land, our power acquisition strategy, our capacity development strategy, you know, the design of our data centers. You know, the latest data centers that we're designing are being designed to a higher density than the ones that we would have built, for example, 10 years ago. You know, we are still commanding, you know, high pricing and strong pricing against that demand backdrop.
You know, I think that our flexibility to be able to support the multimodal requirements of our customers from those in— who operate, you know, in the KVA space up to those who operate in the megawatt space is something that marks us as a little unique across the segment because we manage across three footprints, from wholesale to large footprint, all the way through to retail colo.
In a, you know, in addition to the TAM at the enterprise level for large footprint, I also think that, as we begin to navigate through our channel strategy this year, that that will unlock more TAM for us as we will have sellers on the street who are not part of the cost of sales specifically or the SG&A costs of Equinix, and that is something that we're actively engaged on this year, looking at how we— with some of the tools that we've developed, really activate our channel partners to sell and represent Equinix.
As it relates to the atNorth acquisition, Phil was very close to that, so I might allow him the moment. We are, you know, we're very pleased with the acquisition. We're very pleased with the partnership as it continues to evolve with CPPIB. We believe it's a very complementary acquisition, first of all, in a theater of operation that's extremely important to us. Secondly, with a company that has a 17-year history and shares many of the ethos and values that we do around power and the sustainability narrative in that region.
Thirdly, and more importantly, releasing capacity for us in EMEA, you know, where we know we have a very, very strong demand profile in a timeframe that will be critically important to us. Fourthly, knowing that as soon as we close this transaction, it will be immediately AFFO accretive. A lot of very, very positive elements about the atNorth transaction, which of course is announced but still subject to regulatory process.
Got it.
I just want to hit another one that came in. What is your exposure to the software industry, and how do you view the risks this industry is facing from AI?
When we think about the software industry, I'm assuming that there's an underpin around, you know, some of the Software -as -a -Service providers here that would make use of Equinix as an environment. Our exposure is extremely limited. You know, less than 3% of our total MRR would come from companies in that segment. Our exposure extremely limited. I think again, you know, just to reiterate, you know, we have an extremely diverse customer base across all segments, across all industries, across all geographies. You know, we have very little risk concentration in either a single segment or a single customer across our revenue mix.
You know, I do think what's unfolding in the software industry will take some time because when you think about many of these solutions, they are the backbone of operations for many companies, they are not something that can be simply just switched off, or simply replaced. You know, to answer the question around exposure, it is less than 3% and speaks to the diversity of customer base that we enjoy at Equinix.
Great. That brings us to our rapid fire. Oh, please.
Okay, no, go.
What KPI would you pick as the most important, you know, for your category, and what is your expected growth in that metric 2027?
Well, for us, AFFO per share is the most important measure, and I think we've already indicated our growth prospects.
Just... two mics. Will the data center sector have more, fewer, or the same number of companies a year from now?
Probably roughly the same, but we do know that there are some that are looking to go public this year, mostly in the wholesale space, but we'll see how that plans out.
Terrific. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.