The two-year building programme will take the total number of facilities to 32 and the amount of spending on the venture to $6.9 billion.
Under the terms of the partners' agreement, GIC will own an 80% equity interest in the operation and Equinix will own the remaining 20% equity.
xScale data centres are additions to Equinix’s 220 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres, and are targeted for use by the market's biggest cloud service hyperscalers, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
After the full build-out, current and new data centres will be located across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas.
Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix, said: “With our xScale programme hyperscalers can continue to grow at Equinix while in close proximity to an ecosystem of 10,000 customers.
“The joint venture enables these large deployments to be structured in an off-balance sheet model that aims to preserve capital for investment in our traditional retail data centre and digital infrastructure business, and maintain our strategic and financial flexibility.”
It is expected that the xScale portfolio of 32 facilities will provide more than 600MW of power capacity when fully built out.
