Equinix, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Equinix fourth quarter earnings conference call. All lines will be able to listen only until we open for questions. Today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Chip Newcomb, Senior Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good afternoon and welcome to today's conference call. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements that we will be making today are forward-looking in nature and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and may be affected by the risks we've identified in today's press release, as well as those identified in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K, filed February 12, 2025. Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend to update on or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition, in light of regulation fair disclosure, it is Equinix's policy not to comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it's done to 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 and a list of the reasons why the company uses these measures in today's press release on the Equinix investor relations page at www.equinix.com. We've made available on the IR page of our website a presentation designed to accompany this discussion, along with certain supplemental financial information and other data. We would also like to remind you that we post important information about Equinix on the IR page from time to time and encourage you to check our website regularly, for the most current available information. With us today are Adair Fox-Martin, Equinix's CEO and President, and Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we'll be taking questions from sell-side analysts. In the interest of wrapping this call up in one hour, we'd like to ask these analysts to limit any follow-on questions to one. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Adair.

Thank you, Chip. Good afternoon and a warm welcome to our earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year 2024. Before we delve into the key figures, I wanted to take a moment to underscore that 2024 was a year in which we proved our ability to adapt and to deliver in equally successful measure. Our performance not only demonstrates the strength, resilience and consistency of our business, but also, and increasingly importantly, our ability to meet the future moments in the market. Our unique business model enables us to serve the full spectrum of our customers' connectivity and digital infrastructure requirements. This gives me great confidence as we continue to shape our organization to make the very most of the opportunity ahead. Now, turning to our results, we had an outstanding close to 2024. Revenues for the full year were 8.7 billion, up 8% year over year, an amazing 22 years of consecutive quarterly revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA was 4.1 billion, a 160 basis point improvement in our margins year over year. AFSO per share, our lighthouse metric, grew 10% year over year. This performance is at the top end of our long-term expectations as we continue to compound value for our shareholders. These growth rates are all on a normalized and constant currency basis, excluding lower power costs passed through to our customers. Our as reported numbers and outlook have been tempered by a significantly stronger US dollar during Q4. our team has focused on executing against all the variables within their control to deliver an exceptional quarter and strong outlook, highlighting the underlying health of our business and the scale of our opportunity. To give a sense of our accelerating pace of execution, in both Q4 and 2024, we delivered the best gross bookings performing in our 26-year history. with solid pricing dynamics and strong execution across all three regions. This translated to more than 16,200 deals across more than 6,000 customers in 2024. Supported by proactive demand shaping, putting the right customer with the right workload in the right location, in 2024, we delivered record megawatts sold, including our best year ever for volume sold in non-tier one metros. Our channel program delivered nearly 30% of bookings and more than 50% of company new logos for the year, with wins across a wide range of industry segments and use cases. In our X-scale business during 2024, we leased approximately 150 megawatts of capacity and nearly tripled the investment capital of the program. Our best-in-class operations team delivered greater than five nines of uptime for our customers. They also decreased our PUE by more than 6%, lowering operating costs by 18 million for 2024. This supports both our customers' efforts to green their digital infrastructure and enhances our operational efficiency. Now, as we look to 2025, it is clear that the pace of technological change has never been faster. At the same time, I strongly believe that the market opportunity and Equinix's relevance to that opportunity has never been greater. We are fortunate to host a diverse range of customer workloads within our data centers as we support their broad digital infrastructure needs. from networking and peering, to capital market value creation, to hybrid multi-cloud architectures, and to the workloads driving artificial intelligence use cases and training. We remain confident that the continued democratization of and investment in AI represents a secular demand driver for our business. We continue to cultivate and win significant opportunities for both inferencing and training workloads as we cement Equinix as the place where private AI happens. In Q4, more than half of the volume of our top 25 deals was related to high performance compute and AI workloads. Importantly, we are increasingly seeing a diversification of AI and machine learning use cases across healthcare, finance, transportation, and gaming. Recent wins in customer production use cases include Outrider Technologies, the leader in autonomous yard operations, who are deployed at Equinix to support AI-based training and inference workloads that maximize freight throughput and enhance safety in logistics yards. To seize the market opportunity, we are on a journey to simplify the path for our customers to consume digital infrastructure. Our focus is on three strategic moves. How we can, one, serve better, two, solve smarter, and three, build bolder. These critical priorities are already bearing fruit and we expect them to enable our accretive growth in 2025 and beyond. First, we are serving our customers better by enabling our customer-facing resources to execute with precision and velocity. We introduced automated quoting and capacity visualization tools, revised our compensation plans, and rolled out a more sophisticated approach to segmentation. These changes are part of our journey to accelerate value creation for customers as we nurture our opportunities into bookings and from bookings to revenue faster. It also means that we continually refine our cost to serve whilst simultaneously improving the customer experience. Second, we are solving smarter for our customers. We are simplifying our product portfolio and working to make Equinix the easy button that manages the inherent complexity of hybrid multi-cloud and AI environments. We are prioritizing products that will continue to differentiate and extend the value of Equinix, particularly around our enduring value proposition of connectivity. This focus also resulted in our decision to end of sale Equinix Metal, so we can concentrate our development efforts on solutions core to interconnection. Finally, we are building Boulder. Based on the demand signals we are seeing in the marketplace, we plan to build bigger data centers in fewer, larger phases, allowing us to optimally accommodate the full product continuum on our campuses across traditional retail, larger footprint retail, and X scale. This balanced approach should accelerate our delivery of saleable capacity whilst allowing us to respond to our customers' needs as market dynamics particularly those related to generative AI, continue to evolve at a rapid pace. No other provider in the market offers this unique combination of a data center product continuum with interconnection density at a global scale. Whilst we delivered record gross bookings in Q4, we could have delivered an even stronger bookings outcome if we had available capacity in our Tier 1 metros. By building Boulder, our intent is to sprint towards this demand. More than 65% of our retail expansion is supporting capacity in major metros, and here we have clear visibility into pipeline and fill rates. Now, pivoting to the operational highlights for the quarter. Our customers value our premium service and our global footprint. With two-thirds of our recurring revenues now generated by customers deployed in more than 10 IBXs, we continue to invest to build our network of data centers across the globe. We now have 62 major projects underway in 36 metros across 25 countries, including 16 X-scale projects. This represents approximately 34,000 cabinets of retail and 165 megawatts of X-scale capacity, which will be delivered through to the end of 2026. In November, we were pleased to announce our Singapore 6 build. This facility will provide 20 megawatts of capacity in one of APAC's fastest growing digital economies. This month, we opened our first data centre in Jakarta. This new Indonesian presence expands our reach to 74 metros across 35 countries. Our interconnected digital ecosystems continue to drive growth and customer value. We now have more than 482,000 total interconnections deployed on our industry leading platform. We added an incremental 6,000 underlying interconnections in Q4. Interconnection revenue stepped up 9% year-over-year on a normalized and constant currency basis, now representing 19% of our recurring revenues. Equinix Fabric continues to over-index, as customers increasingly adopt 25 and 50 gigabit per second circuits. Interconnection and ecosystem customer wins and use cases included payments processing company Webspace, who is leveraging Fabric Cloud Router to connect to their key cloud partners and lower their networking costs. Zayo, the largest independent fiber provider in North America, is aggressively expanding its fiber infrastructure in key markets with Equinix, delivering on-demand, high-capacity connectivity to meet the growing demands of enterprise and exponential bandwidth growth driven by AI. Our XScale portfolio continues to see strong overall demand as service providers expand to support their cloud and AI businesses. Since our last earnings call, we leased an incremental 31 megawatts across our Paris 12 and Paris 13 assets. Fumitive XScale leasing is now over 400 megawatts globally. Whilst our announced and completed projects are more than 85% leased and pre-leased, we have a strong funnel of additional X-scale opportunities in 2025, as customers increasingly look to secure capacity for delivery dates in 2027 and beyond. We secured two new native cloud on-ramps this quarter in New York and Mexico City. We host more than twice the metros with multiple native cloud on ramps as our nearest competitor. Native access to the clouds enables improved management of security, costs, control, and neutrality, especially for customers pursuing a hybrid and or a multi-cloud strategy. Ease of connectivity and access to data stored in the clouds is a key requirement for inferencing use cases and training workloads. Our ability to deliver value for our customers and accretive growth for our shareholders in 2024 is a testament to the strength of our team and the quality of our differentiated business model. I'm proud of our performance and excited by the opportunity for our business in the year ahead. With that, I'll turn it over to Keith to cover the quarter's financials.