Equinix (EQIX) 2026年第一季度：首席执行官与首席财务官电话会议要点

Madison Rezaei+1 917 344 8622madison.rezaei@bernsteinsg.com Nancy Wu+1 917 344 8545nancy.wu@bernsteinsg.com Price Target EQIX 1,222.00 USD Equinix (EQIX) 1Q26: CEO + CFO Call Takeaways On Thursday, we sat down with Adaire Fox-Martin, Olivier Leonetti, and a group of investorsto discuss EQIX’s 1Q earnings. We maintain our positive view on the stock, building convictionaround major growth themes, and reiterate Outperform at $1,222. Interconnection ruled the day. Interconnection represents only ~17% of EQIX revenue,and for the last several years, we have thought of this segment as more of a decision criterionthan a revenue driver. But in a world of AI, it has renewed life, contributing high-margingrowth as well as a defensible moat. The company continues to bolster the segment, adding110+ neocloud nodes across its footprint. Capacity allocation has become a strategic decision.EQIX is particularly well positionedto capture inference demand with its major metro footprint, where proximity, poweravailability, and connectivity are increasingly critical. As demand evolves, the company isplacing greater emphasis on how it allocates capacity between traditional colocation andxScale, ensuring it can support different workload types. Big builds incoming, ahead of schedule.As we mentioned in our earnings recap, EQIXis building a lot more than we anticipated last summer—incremental ~2GW moved topotentially closer to ~5GW. They are also beating delivery and build timelines—specifically,Equinix has accelerated ~20% of retail builds—extra impressive in a market where almosteveryone else is missing. Strong execution should continue.Churn this quarter was exceptionally low at 1.7% -while this isn’t necessarily the “new normal”, there’s reason to believe the new target is ~2%(as opposed to 2.0-2.5%), due to earlier renewal engagement through the “available-to-renew” framework and a more proactive focus on churn prevention, upsell, and cross-sell forlong-tail customers. Additionally, the company delivered their second consecutive quarter ofdouble-digit MRR growth. Management team gelling + overhauling culture.While all management teams like toemphasize their cohesion, we did come away encouraged by signs of an aligned, execution-driven culture within EQIX. Grassroots project examples—including the conversion of anelevator shaft into sellable capacity—left us optimistic about the company’s ability to deliver. Madison Rezaei+1 917 344 8622 madison.rezaei@bernsteinsg.com Investment Implications We value EQIX on a Price to Adjusted Funds From Operations (AFFO) per share multiple. Our$1,222 price target is based on 25x our 2027E AFFO per share of $48.63. DETAILS OUR KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE SESSION 1.Interconnection is becoming an increasingly critical moat. Interconnection emerged as a central theme in the discussion, with management emphasizing both accelerating momentumand growing strategic importance across the platform. The company highlighted broad-based strength in interconnection-related metrics, including interconnection revenue growth, strong Fabric revenue and bookings growth, and risinginterconnection density driven by AI-oriented workloads. Management repeatedly underscored that interconnection is acore differentiator at Equinix’s scale, particularly as customers deploy increasingly complex and distributed architecturesinvolving clouds, networks, LLMs, neo-clouds, security providers, and enterprises. Additionally Equinix is increasingly makingdeliberate capacity-allocation decisions that favor networking-dense deployments over pure compute use cases, prioritizinglong-term ecosystem value, stickiness, and pricing over near-term utilization. This strategic focus is reinforced in the go-to-market model: every enterprise sales pod now includes a dedicated interconnection specialist, with team-level accountabilityand compensation gates tied to interconnection outcomes, ensuring that interconnection is actively monetized rather thanincidental to colocation deployments. 2. AI is shifting infrastructure demand towards major metros and smaller, distributed footprints. The team emphasized that while early AI deployments were largely centered on centralized training workloads—often servedby hyperscale customers in larger, more remote facilities—the next phase of AI growth is increasingly driven by inferenceand agentic AI. These workloads are inherently more distributed and are being deployed closer to users, enterprises, andnetworks rather than in a small number of centralized locations. As a result, AI-driven demand is increasingly showing up assmaller, network-dense deployments across major metropolitan areas, often in the form of inference and networking nodesrather than large, single-tenant compute footprints. Management highlighted that neo-clouds and leading LLM providersare already deploying significant numbers of network nodes across the Equinix platform, reflecting this shift toward metro-located, distrib