Equinix at a crossroads

The AI boom has made data centers the steel mills of the 21st century. Yet Equinix's neutrality risks trapping it in REIT-speed growth while inference flows elsewhere

Neutrality at the speed of debt

Equinix should be in the sweet spot of history. The world is in the midst of the largest capital expenditure cycle computing has ever seen. Trillions of dollars are being poured into AI data centers, the new steel mills of the twenty-first century. Equinix runs the neutral hubs where all this traffic interconnects. By rights, the company ought to be basking in a generational tailwind.

And yet, its stock has sagged. When management told investors in June that annual capital spending would climb to $4-5 billion from 2026 to 2029, but that funds-from-operations would only grow 5-9% per year, the shares plunged nearly 10% in a single day. Analysts cut ratings. The market wasn’t celebrating the buildout; it was discounting it.

This paradox—that Equinix sits at the apparent heart of the AI boom yet fails to capture AI-boom multiples—demands explanation. The answer lies not in hype cycles but in capital structure: the way Equinix is financed, the way AI inference workloads are shifting, and the limits of neutrality as a business model.