Hey, everybody, and welcome to The Six Five Summit 2026. The theme of this year's show is AI Unleashed. I am here with my colleague, Daniel Newman. How are you doing, my friend? Isn't it amazing, in the last three and a half years where we have been seeing AI, how it has gone from literally recipes to multinational enterprise agentic operations. Pretty amazing, isn't it?
Oh my gosh. Yes. I do not even know if we can harness the power right now, but I am spinning in loops just thinking about all those agentic things we can do. I am going to try to get every buzzword into a single sentence right now.
I tried.
No, you did great. You did great.
Yeah.
It is really exciting times, and this event has been tremendous, all of you that have been with us. This AI infrastructure track is just an absolute banger from top to bottom. So many great guests. Pat, we've got to be pretty excited. We got another great guest, don't we?
We do. I'd like to introduce Adaire Fox-Martin, CEO and President of Equinix, to talk about things like connectivity and orchestration. While I know it's fun to just focus on the compute, there's so many other elements that add to the enterprise AI deployment experience and build out to get business value out of those agents. Welcome to the show, Adaire.
Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.
Thanks for coming on.
Let's start big picture, Adaire. For multiple decades, no question, Equinix has been at the center of these technological shifts. Sometimes people know it, sometimes they don't, because you're one of those companies that's quietly powering and enabling and providing the connectivity, the compute, all the important things that they need. This is interesting because we went from internet moment to the multi-cloud moment, but this AI moment feels big. It feels even bigger than anything in the past that's happened. I guess just your big picture readout as you look at this moment, why does this feel so fundamentally different, and how is it changing Equinix and what you're doing for your customers?
Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you guys today. Look, I think Equinix is a company with a three-decade history of navigating technology and technology changes. You're quite right. We were the neutral ground where the internet scaled. We were the neutral platform that made multi-cloud connectivity very real. Now, as we unleash agentic AI and inference with these extraordinary and amazing capabilities, we're the neutral exchange that I think can run, connect, and orchestrate it all. Those three words are very important because when the shifts that we've seen in the past have actually changed how data moves, I think the AI movement changes how infrastructure needs to think about what it's doing with the data, where it's processing it, what it's reasoning over, acting on it in real time, doing it at the edge, navigating complex jurisdictional requirements.
It's a fundamental different ask of enterprises. We have 60% of the Fortune 500 sitting at Equinix, such a privilege. We see firsthand some of the challenges that our customers are navigating and some of the opportunities ahead of them.
Yeah, you really do have a diverse customer set, the 60% enterprises, but you also have major cloud hyperscalers, global telecom networks, and others. I used to have a CFO when I worked in the industry that said there is no credibility without financial credibility, and you just raised your financial outlook-
in a significant way, showing a lot of momentum in your business. There's a lot of talk about, oh, we're in a bubble, AKA a temporary AI investment cycle.
Beyond the numbers that you put up, and in your outlook, what are the demand signals that you're getting out there that gives you confidence that this is a long-term infrastructure transformation?
Look, I think our customers, enterprises, they're ready to build their future, but they're still running on infrastructure that was built for the past. Actually, that gap is what's driving demand.
Right.
If I look at the entirety of the data center and infrastructure space, we're unique in terms of our focus on enterprise customers and on, as we mentioned already, the breadth of customers that we serve. I think the demand is very durable. We're very confident in the demand. It's about modernizing legacy on-prem infrastructure that was never built for today's distributed AI-driven workloads. The second is these new AI native workloads-
That's right.
and some of the service providers that are powering those. When I look at both cases, in the majority of cases, they're already Equinix customers, and so the demand that we see is very broad-based, very durable across geographies, across industries, across customer types. Very durable. We look at a whole series of different inputs because we're so unique in order to ensure that we are confident in the demand that we see, not in our own pipeline only, but broader signals that feed into the industry as a whole. That's why we felt so good about raising our guidance on the back of record backlog, record interconnections, record bookings, as we've progressed over the past three or four quarters.
Yeah. It's interesting because I always tend to believe that when companies really do come out and aggressively raise guidance, and again, every CEO and every board has a style of how they want to do it. We were talking about one of the chip companies as you were coming into the call about how they're just always very conservative, and the market wants big raises of guidance. But I also say you also have to look at those signals. There's companies like TSMC that are just notoriously conservative about CapEx. When suddenly they're spending a lot of CapEx, you go, "This is not a company that just willy-nilly raises numbers.
Yeah.
I think when a company like yours that has a very stable, steady, durable kind of investor type and track record, you don't just raise guidance on a whim. You guys are very methodical and thoughtful about it, because again, in the end, you're always better off being a little more conservative and beating. So when you're raising, you're like, "We really feel good." So it was really encouraging to see it because you guys are such a, I say such a bellwether for enterprise.
As enterprises are moving from kind of, we talk about the lot. Gosh, we've done three years of POC to production, right?
Right.
You and your team have the distinct pleasure of seeing the customers up close because they're building in your environments. There are some patterns that are emerging in how they're building. What are the primary ways that you're seeing these enterprise customers deploying AI today? I know we live at the front edge, and we like to talk about the future and the harness but at that deployment level, what are you seeing, and what are these approaches telling us about where things are heading?
I think the approaches that we're seeing are really underpinning that durable demand and the confidence that we see in that durable demand. Thank you for the comments, Daniel. We have always been a company that deploys highest and best use of capital as we look at how we build out the infrastructure for tomorrow on behalf of our customers. Today, we're underwriting the cases that we're building today to the same yields that our investors have enjoyed in the past. Again, just ensuring highest and best use of capital. We're seeing really in our data center environment, four distinct use cases from enterprise customers, and all four are scaling simultaneously. Now, the first one I'm going to call stack. Some people use the term enterprise for this one, but because we're talking about enterprise customers totally, I'm using the term stack here.
This is placing your stack in an Equinix facility so that you can run open models on a private AI infrastructure, reducing token cost, connecting to the clouds and to some other OEM partners that may be providing a service into the infrastructure that you're deploying. So that's the first use. The second is sovereign. This is where you need to ensure data residency and compliance. We're operating in 36 countries today. We're sovereign almost by design. The software capability that we've added to our environment allows for geo-fencing capabilities. In other words, being able to stay inside the jurisdiction. The third use case is batch. This is deploying the factories that are available at Equinix for training and batch inferencing. Again, largely driven by new technologies in our data centers, such as liquid cooling.
The last one is the latency-sensitive workloads, those where the agentic work nodes need to be present in a metro in order to ensure that latency capability, but also for some customers, that reduces the backhaul costs of bringing data back to center. So those four, stack, sovereign, batch, latency sensitive, these are all ones that we're seeing growing simultaneously. Again, coming back to the point that we made at the start is what's speaking to the durable demand that we're seeing for enterprise customers for these capabilities.
That was a great outline of the different deployment methods in this new age. It's interesting, I've spent way too long in the tech industry, over 35 years, and every time a new wave comes, it's, "Oh, it's going to replace another form of technology." The reality is very little gets replaced.
Everything is pretty much additive. There might be growth in certain areas, but we are still very much using mainframes, and we are very much using mini computers out there. There's also the complexity that has come from the coordination, the desire to coordinate multiple clouds. Remember 10 years ago when it was going to be, "Oh, I'm just going to use one cloud." Then it end up where 2.7, I think, is the new, and I always like to say you're one acquisition short of another cloud partner, right? So we've got multiple clouds, AI models, agent harnesses, data platforms, and security environments all need to be coordinated simultaneously. Can you talk about orchestrating these multiple variables? I think I'm leading the witness here. We've written about you're in a good position as a neutral infrastructure player to try to simplify and orchestrate all of this.
Yeah, for sure. We have the opportunity to work so closely with our customers, so it does give you a degree of empathy and understanding for the challenges that a CIO faces today. You really want to be in a position where we're helping them to drive more strategic value, more strategic outcomes from their technology investments, rather than simply just managing complexity. It's very true, Patrick, what you described there around the environments of our customers. They are multi-cloud. They are a combination of on-premise or data at a site like Equinix, and orchestrating all of that is challenging. You have to do it inside, not just the needs of the business, but sometimes within legislative frameworks that are driven by sovereignty requirements, to name but one. Most of the networks that we've seen today, they are built for performance, they're not built for compliance.
Yeah.
With Equinix, you get both. That's what we've been working on with Equinix Fabric Intelligence inside our environment, which allows you to adjust, to heal a network in real time, to have agents manage autonomously the creation of paths across that network in real time, so that the CIOs of today can focus on the business outcomes for tomorrow and not on inherently managing this complexity on a daily basis.
Let's talk about something that maybe feels a little bit more nuanced. Data centers for us tech nerds, like Patrick and myself, we're very excited about it. We're here in Texas, so we're just like, "Dig, baby, dig. Build, baby, build." We love it. We also are seeing a growing, I would call it division almost societally, right, from us in tech that truly see this as intelligence being democratized and brought to all, bringing up society. Just like every technological revolution of the past has made us better, has made the world better, has created more jobs, more economic prosperity. There's a subset of the population that is challenging this. You're seeing data center moratoriums raised around the world. There's concerns about power, although I keep hearing golf courses and almonds are harder to more water.
The stories and the rumors maintain viability and visibility in the press, land use, community impact. I'd love to get your take because you've been, by the way, dealing with this for a long time.
Yeah.
You're not a rise from the opportunity company that suddenly came out or, no knock on these companies, or a Bitcoin mining company that suddenly became a cloud company. You guys have been dealing with this at probably a different scale than it is today. How do you think about being a long-term neighbor to communities? How are you thinking about where you're going to put your future locations, how you're thinking about energy and doing. I guess I'd just love to get your big, broad viewpoint on
Yeah
the bigger impact of the build-out on society.
Look, I think first of all, the infrastructure that we operate is actually essential to how the world works. You look at things that are made possible because data centers such as those in the Equinix portfolio actually exist. Even if you think about moving home yourself. I just did that recently. So you move in, your gas, your water, your electricity, your internet, right? It's almost like the fourth utility because it's such an essential part of what connects us all today. For us, this has been something that we've been driving for three decades, and we are very conscious that we are not a visitor to a community, that we are a neighbor.
Yeah.
We are a neighbor who has the intent to be a long-term neighbor and a good neighbor during the time that we are part of that community. It comes in many different forms, the role that you play. First of all, there's an element of engaging extremely early in the process and actually working with communities as to what benefits you can bring to that location, but what additional things would add benefit to that community in particular. That early engagement has been key for us. The transparency of how we operate and what we do has been key for us. We are very transparent about our power usage. We are very transparent about our water usage, and we work to be more efficient and effective in both of those things.
We also have always adopted the principle that we fund any energy or grid infrastructure costs directly ourselves that are driven by the requirement to drive the workloads in our data centers, not passing those on to domestic ratepayers or domestic properties. There are numerous examples of us having closed opportunities like that right across the year, the most recent one just in Hampton. We work to create meaningful opportunities from construction and skilled trade jobs, to pathway for veterans, to programs that build the next generation of technical talent. We look at using only local businesses, and businesses that perhaps are owned by underrepresented groups to be part of the economy that we're building in that jurisdiction. There isn't one simple answer. You have to look at it holistically, how you're using energy, how you're sourcing energy, how you're innovating for energy.
Looking at our investments in SMR technology and bring our own in adding to the grid. Then when we become a neighbor, how we participate in a meaningful and positive way in that neighborhood. We've been doing it for 30 years, and we take great pride in the trust that's placed in us, not just in the businesses that run at Equinix, but in the communities that we're part of.
It sounds like you guys have thought this out, and I think that's going to become increasingly important. If you look at where the slowdown in this business maybe takes place more than anything.
Yeah.
You talk about is it energy? Are we memory constrained? Are we compute constrained? We are regulation and policy constrained, right? Obviously, in different parts of the world, but the U.S. is probably one of the most aggressive Western in terms of doing things, and we still get caught up with red tape. There are dozens of data center projects right now that are completely being held up, because trying to gain the consensus of the communities and winning the politicians with the people.
Yeah.
I do love and just kind of want to end almost on this note, but I love what you said about this is essential. People maybe in some ways you don't know exactly what you're asking ChatGPT to do is not considered, but when it comes to the way that we are connected to the world every single day across every single moment, you turn the lights out and people will realize really, really quickly. I always say, just misplace your phone for about 5 minutes and quickly realize how helpless you feel. A quick story. I was in California, and T-Mobile went down. Pat was there, he was with me. You could literally see I lost my darn mind.
I could not get a signal, and I did not know what I would do, how I would function for the next 24, and it was multiple hours that the towers were down, and it was like-
Yeah
this is essential, and companies like yours are the companies that are enabling that hookup, that connectivity to the world. So congratulations on all the success. I want to thank you so much for being part of The Six Five Summit this year. I hope to have you with us many more times in the future and many more conversations, Adaire.
Thank you so much. I appreciate the time and the interest in Equinix.
Thank you.
Thank you everybody so much for tuning into this session at The Six Five Summit. We are at AI Unleashed 2026. Do not forget to hit subscribe, follow us on social media. Check out all of our summit coverage at sixfivemedia.com. We will see you all in the next.