CEO Charles Meyer sits down with Fortune’s Susie Gharib to discuss.

How Equinix is using A.I. to increase its energy efficiency 

Tech

Equinix is using A.I. to increase its energy efficiency 


How Equinix is using A.I. to increase its energy efficiency 


Charles. We're seeing ai artificial intelligence just about everywhere. How important is this technology for your company? Equinix? Well, very important is the answer. Not only are we a meaningful user of it ourselves, we're also a fundamental enabler of it and candidly, I think AI is one of the most powerful driving forces in digital transformation today. Alright, well give us an example of you operate hundreds of data centers all around the world. What role does a I play in managing that huge inflow of data? We use it in a number of areas. We use it to target our customers in terms of figuring out what the best customers that are going to have the most demand for our services. And another really interesting way we're doing that ties to our sustainability strategy is we're using AI to really understand how to use power more efficiently. Um and so we've instrumented a lot of our equipment within our data centers to understand when to use power, how to use power and how to use it most efficiently. Tell us a little bit more about that because I know you've been very successful on this um improving your energy efficiency. How does this work? Yeah, essentially, it allows you to really use artificial intelligence to anticipate where power needs to be applied, how cooling and data centers needs to be done uh really to improve the what we call the power usage efficiency of the and the efficiency of the facility overall. So your company has been around a long time compare now your operations with AI compared to how you used to do it in the past. How much have things changed for you? I think things continue to change not only for us but for the broad industry every day we're seeing people across sectors saying they want to take data which is coming from everywhere these days, devices on your risk from machinery, from sensors, all these things take that data, you know use it to generate insights about your business and then take action that improves your performance. And as I said, we're doing it in the case of energy. Other people are doing it in retail and financial services and manufacturing. You name it. So in the past, how would that go? How would you get that information? Well, you know, it used to be, you would you would have reports about what was going on in the field, they would be compiled sent to headquarters evaluated, you would say here's the trends I think I see and then you would make a decision on that and now it's all real time and everything. Data is being ingested, you know from around the world, you know, put into the cloud, intersected with other data sources manipulated with AI algorithms and then the insights are developed or developed and delivered back out to the people who need them and then super speed time. I mean it's not like months really years. No, it's it's near real time. Absolutely. So it sounds like you're using ai in many areas of your business. Do you have enough data scientists, engineers, and other ai experts working in your company? I mean how hard is it to hire a I talent difficult, you know, I think ai machine learning um and then just software developers generally are probably the you know sort of areas of talent that are most in demand and I think you have to really have a compelling overall employer value proposition to attract that talent. You're very enthusiastic about Ai. Um And many of your customers, It seems are also their big Fortune 500 companies like Amazon Microsoft Walmart, big users of Ai from what they tell you and from your own experience, how does the future look to you in terms of a wider use of artificial intelligence? I think it looks extraordinary. I think it's going to be I think it's going to be pervasive and we won't even know it. Um And I think it is already, I mean you know what what what ads were being served on our phone, those things are all driven by ai, you know what products we're seeing in stores, um how they're priced in real time. Those are things that are already happening and I think it's going to impact every aspect of our life