Equinix to expand South Korean data centres

Equinix has announced the start of construction of South Korea’s first xScale data centre to support the growth of the rapidly growing domestic cloud market. This effort extends the establishment of a joint venture in the form of a US$525 million partnership with the sovereign wealth fund Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) announced in January 2022 to establish and operate two Xscale data centres in Seoul.

“In addition to meeting the needs of hyperscalers, we will accelerate the adoption of hybrid and multicloud by domestic companies and global companies operating in Korea,” said Hye-duk Jang, CEO of Equinix Korea.

The joint venture between Equinix and GIC will establish additional hyperscale data centres, named SL2x and SL3x, to provide a total power capacity of more than 45MW. The SL2x, currently under construction, should be completed in late 2023.

With a total investment of $210 million, the SL2x will provide more than 6,600 square metres of colocation space and 22MW of power capacity. Equinix expects SL2x to meet the growing requirements of global hyperscale providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

Once the Xscale data centre is established in South Korea, hyperscale providers will be able to add deployments of core workloads to their existing access points on Equinix. The company said this will enable scalability to 66 global metropolises and provide direct interconnectivity to customers and strategic business partners.

Equinix opened the SL1 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Seoul in 2019. Since then, it has expanded SL1 to achieve 100% availability, Equinix said. SL1 currently provides a total capacity of 1,000 cabinets and a colocation space of more than 3,200 square metres.