Equinix isn't racing to build the biggest data centers. Its edge is being in the middle of cities, and nowhere shows that better than its Miami landmark.
Equinix stock is up 33% this year, beating every megacap tech name. That's lifted the company's market cap to $100 billion, the most valuable data center REIT by far.
A Different Bet Than the Hyperscalers
Hyperscalers like Amazon and Google, along with neoclouds like CoreWeave, are spending big. Collectively, that's hundreds of billions of dollars a year on massive AI infrastructure.
Equinix takes a different approach. It rents space in 281 legacy colocation facilities across 77 metro areas to customers of all sizes. Those customers run everything from Nvidia to AMD hardware.
This week, Equinix struck a deal with Nvidia and open-source cloud platform Together AI. The new offering, called Equinix Inference Exchange, launches in the first quarter of 2027.
"The companies you already use are all running on us," said Maryam Zand, an Equinix vice president who runs its AI ecosystem strategy.
Why Inference Changes the Math
AI training teaches a model from large datasets. Inference is what happens after, the actual decisions a model makes in real-world use.
Inference is expected to make up half of all AI compute by 2030, according to McKinsey. That shift favors exactly the kind of urban, interconnected locations Equinix has built its business around.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that case directly at an Equinix event this week. Distributed architecture, he said, means "you could both simultaneously be close and be far away."
The Miami Facility That Started It All
Equinix's Miami property is known as MI1, or the NAP of the Americas. It's one of the most interconnected data centers anywhere in the world.
The 750,000-square-foot facility in downtown Miami serves as the primary gateway for internet traffic between the US and Latin America. More than half of its roughly 130 network carriers are based in Latin American and Caribbean markets.
That urban, high-connectivity design is exactly the model Equinix now argues gives it an edge in the inference era. MI1 was originally built for an entirely different purpose, decades ago.
Not Every Investor Is Convinced
Short seller Jim Chanos has bet against Equinix and rival Digital Realty, calling them "not great businesses" with low returns on a capital-intensive model.
Data center analyst Vlad Galabov offered a more measured read. Equinix was "too slow" to react to gigawatt-scale AI demand, he said, but its diversified client base means it isn't exposed to AI bubble risk the way pure-play neoclouds are.
What Miami's Role Signals
Equinix reported $2.63 billion in quarterly revenue, up 16% year over year, with $477 million in net income. CoreWeave, by comparison, lost $626 million on similar revenue.
For Miami, MI1's role in this story isn't nostalgia. It's a real bet on an old property. The site built to connect Latin America two decades ago is now positioned right where AI's next phase needs it.
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