Equinix, Inc. Common Stock REIT 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

You may begin. Good afternoon, and welcome to our third quarter conference call.

Before we get started, I want to remind you that some of the statements that we make today are forward-looking in nature and involve certain risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and may be affected by the risks we identified in today's press release in our filings with the SEC. Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition, in light of Regulation Fair Disclosure, it is our policy to not comment on our financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. On today's conference call, we will provide non-GAAP measures. We provide a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in today's press release on the Equinix Investor Relations page at www.equinix.com.

We have made available on the IR page of our website a presentation that we will refer to, along with certain supplemental financial information and other data. With us today are Adaire Fox-Martin, CEO and President, Olivier Leonetti, CFO, and Phillip Konieczny, SVP of Finance. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Adaire.

Thank you, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. Q3 was a strong quarter that demonstrated the growing importance and differentiated position of Equinix in an evolving market. Enterprises are relying on our interconnected ecosystem more than ever, and you can see this in our results. We delivered double-digit growth in monthly recurring revenue, interconnection revenue, and AFFO per share. These are the key metrics that drive long-term value creation, and we are once again raising our full-year guidance. I want to thank our teams around the world for the disciplined execution that went into delivering such strong performance. We've met with many of you over the past few months. A few common themes emerged. I'd like to speak to these themes directly today. First, why we believe our demand is durable and how our pricing strategy reflects the value we enable for customers and partners.

Second, how we are delivering capacity at pace in an environment where power availability, legislation, and community sentiment are creating some industry headwinds. Third, how our balance sheet is an advantage when it comes to funding growth amidst the volatility we have all seen in recent weeks. I will frame this quarter's results through these three lenses so that you have a clear view of each. I will start with demand. It is strong, it is broad-based, and it is durable. We have a unique purview to this. We serve customers across nearly every industry and workload, and no single customer accounts for more than 2.5% of our revenue. During the quarter, we executed more than 25,000 transactions across more than 3,200 customers. The breadth of our customer base means that our results do not rely on any single customer, industry, geography, or technology trend.

Our ecosystem adds to the durability of demand, including more than half a million interconnections, and every new participant makes it more valuable for everyone within it. As we actively engage with our customers and review market data, we see firm evidence of sustained enterprise infrastructure investment, both traditional and AI related. Large enterprises, particularly in financial services, are building out their own hybrid AI infrastructure. This is contributing to what you see in the industry data. Server spending is projected to grow more than 80%, and AI server backlogs have doubled this year. More than 80% of enterprises are running or planning AI at the edge, and more than one-third of large enterprises have used five or more AI models, a trend we expect will continue as they optimize their token costs.

Against this backdrop, enterprises have a growing need for solutions that simplify complexity, accelerate deployment times, maximize returns on their investments, and deliver lasting value. These are the things that Equinix does exceptionally well, and it is showing up in our results. Monthly recurring revenue grew 11% on a normalized and constant currency basis, our fourth straight quarter of double-digit growth. Interconnection revenue grew 10%, with Fabric up 24%. Churn was just 1.7%, an indicator of how enduring our customer and partner relationships are, strengthened by interconnection. Sales volume accelerated. We delivered record annualized gross bookings of $533 million, up 35%. Total sales activity, which includes pre-sales, grew 38%, marking our third straight quarter north of 30% growth. We are profitably growing our market share, and we have already booked 60% of our Q4 bookings target. All of this is contributing to strong financial performance.

AFFO per share grew 12% on a normalized basis, excluding the atNorth transaction. Including atNorth, AFFO per share was up 18%. In this environment of growing demand and constrained supply, pricing is a top focus. There is no question this is becoming a more meaningful lever for us, and we expect that trend to continue. It starts with new deals, which are a leading indicator. Pricing on new deals was up 12% year-over-year in the quarter. That same demand strength also benefits in-place contracts that come up over time. We have made renewals a focus, and we are already seeing results, including healthy increases in negotiated pricing. Customers need access to an ecosystem, not just space and power. The value we deliver from them is reflected both in our pricing and in our strong yields.

We see a meaningful pricing opportunity as contracts renew and our innovation creates even more value for our customers. This quarter, we announced strong innovation across our portfolio. Last month, we introduced Equinix Inference Exchange with NVIDIA and Together AI. It gives enterprises a faster path from pilot to production with the freedom to choose from more than 200 open models for every workload. We also unveiled Equinix Fabric One, which will broaden the opportunity for interconnection. It lets customers simply define the connectivity outcome they need, and the network composes itself. AWS and Google Cloud are our lead integration partners. We are entering beta with a broad range of customers ahead of general availability early next year. Just last week, we opened a global network of innovation centers where enterprises can test liquid-cooled AI infrastructure in real-world conditions before they scale.

This is an area of growth with Q3 liquid cooling bookings up more than tenfold year over year. These kind of solutions will help us stay ahead of what our customers and partners need and highlight just a few examples of these types of needs we are seeing and how we met them in Q3. Eaton, a global leader in intelligent power management, used Equinix Managed Solutions, Network Edge, and Fabric to deploy a new compute, storage, and network platform for rapid application migration. They chose Equinix because we bring these capabilities together in one place with the global reach and necessary interconnection between systems. Virtu Financial, one of the world's leading electronic market makers, continues to expand its footprint with Equinix. Our proximity to major exchanges, market data providers, and partners helps Virtu deliver the speed, availability, and connectivity its trading platforms demand.

We are collaborating with Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station to build a next-generation AI research environment. Together with Dell and AMD, Equinix is delivering a 1.2 megawatt liquid-cooled AI deployment in Dallas, providing the agency with the power, connectivity, and room to scale needed to achieve new breakthroughs. Customer demand is only part of the picture. Capacity is what ultimately turns that demand into sustained growth. I will turn to that next. We have been building data centers for nearly 30 years. Whilst power availability, legislation, and community sentiment have created some headwinds for the industry, our results continue to demonstrate our ability to expand our capacity and accelerate our delivery timelines. We have significantly increased the number of cabinets we initially planned to deliver in the second half of this year, and we now expect to exceed our retail capacity plan for the full year by nearly 40%.

We expect more than 13,000 cabinets in Q4, our highest quarter of delivery on record, and more than 20% of that Q4 capacity has been pre-sold. We are well on our way to filling future capacity, with 15% of retail capacity coming online in 2027 already pre-sold. What matters most of all for the road ahead is our pipeline. We have 3 gigawatts of developable capacity, which includes our projects currently in progress. About 80% of that is in our top 25 metros, and the land, power, and permitting is largely secured. On top of that 3 gigawatts, the atNorth transaction we completed this quarter with CPP Investments brings an active development pipeline of 800 megawatts coming online over the next five years, as well as an additional 1 gigawatt of opportunity for future expansion. I want to emphasize that capacity isn't simply a numbers game.

Where a megawatt sits matters. A megawatt in a major interconnection hub is worth more than one elsewhere. That is why we focus on yield, not just megawatts, and why we can deliver returns well above our cost of capital. We serve core critical workloads that run the everyday economy. Our new retail builds are sized for these use cases, generally 60 megawatts or less, and they are substantially smaller than the large-scale campuses drawing the most regulatory attention. We also do not depend on any single build to meet our growth objectives. We have 48 projects across 32 markets currently in progress. That lets us manage risk and opportunity across the construction process. All of this gives us a high degree of confidence in our ability to execute against our development pipeline. As our industry expands, communities have legitimate questions and concerns. We take these concerns seriously.