Equinix expands Cisco Nvidia partnership to accelerate enterprise AI infrastructure deployment

Equinix Strengthens AI Infrastructure Collaboration With Tech Giants

Equinix has announced an expanded AI infrastructure collaboration with Cisco and Nvidia, designed to help enterprises deploy AI workloads across its global network of 280 data centers spanning 77 markets. The Redwood City, California-based digital infrastructure and data center colocation provider unveiled the partnership Tuesday, focusing on making it easier for customers and channel partners to deploy the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia through standardized factory blueprints and automation1

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Gordon Mackintosh, senior vice president of global partner sales and ecosystems at Equinix, explained that the company is working deeply with Cisco to connect the Cisco Secure AI Factory architecture with Nvidia to accelerate AI factory capability. "The success of enterprise AI starts with its physical foundation," Mackintosh said. "Our collaboration with Cisco, Nvidia and Presidio delivers the infrastructure AI workloads demand, while giving customers a place to prove it out before they scale"2

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Presidio Partnership Enables Move AI From Pilots to Production

A key component of the expanded Cisco Nvidia partnership involves Equinix's collaboration with Presidio around PATH (Programmable AI Tech Hubs), which will help accelerate customers from experimental and pilot phases into full AI production across the enterprise. PATH is an Equinix and Presidio project that allows customers to test outcomes they can drive in the enterprise before more broadly scaling them into enterprise production1

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Chad Dunn, vice president of solution engineering at Presidio, emphasized that the partnership addresses a critical infrastructure gap. "We see that time and time again, especially in the metropolitan areas," Dunn said. "We see the expansion of data center providers like Equinix is incredibly important to enable the expansion of generative AI now for us"1

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. The solution provider will deploy its Programmable AI Technology Hub across Equinix facilities, giving customers a testing environment to validate and refine AI infrastructure before enterprise-wide rollouts2

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Addressing Infrastructure Challenges for Hybrid AI Environments

The partnership tackles a fundamental challenge facing enterprises: most small and midsize companies lack the power, cooling, or infrastructure to handle modern systems based on Nvidia Grace Blackwell or Vera Rubin technologies. "This is all going to be liquid-cooled at some point, and those capabilities don't exist at our customer facilities in that market segment," Dunn explained1

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Dunn drew parallels to cloud adoption, noting that hybrid AI environments will become the norm. "Remember when cloud first came out, people wondered if everything would all go to the cloud? What's going to remain on-prem? We all know that settled down to be a hybrid environment. It's going to be no different with AI," he said1

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Network Interconnects and Global Scale Drive Enterprise AI Success

What sets Equinix apart in this AI infrastructure push is its specialty in network interconnects and global footprint. The company currently serves 10,000 customers, including 3,000 cloud customers, and has 3 gigawatts of capacity under development1

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. "Not only does it give us the data center facilities that we need to support the kind of infrastructure we need for generative AI, but they have a huge specialty in network interconnects so if we need to be connected to our customer environments, it's very simple for us to do that," Dunn noted1

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Mackintosh emphasized that new AI workloads require this ecosystem to be deployed successfully, and with the market shifting from AI testing to production, Equinix sees this as just the first of many engagements with partners across the globe. The focus on purpose-built architectures that are pre-tested aims to enable future demands of the enterprise, particularly for AI workloads running across the enterprise1

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