Guy Danskine, Managing Director – US West, Equinix

In an interview with Invest:, Guy Danskine, managing director, US West at Equinix, discussed the company’s role in supporting Texas’ digital infrastructure, the rising impact of AI, and the importance of Dallas and Houston within its broader strategy. “Dallas is going to continue to grow, and as the Houston economy continues to grow, the need for digital infrastructure to support that will also increase,” Danskine said.

How is Equinix evolving its value proposition to serve energy clients and digital-first workloads such as AI and cloud services?

Equinix has been operating for 27 years. We were founded in Palo Alto, California, and our name comes from the heritage of how the company started. The EQ means equal, N means neutral, and IX means internet exchange. Equinix stands for equal neutral internet exchange.

The company was founded because its founders saw the need for organizations to connect to each other, and there needed to be a neutral party that could facilitate that interconnection. That remains central to who we are today. We do many different things compared to when the company started, but the core of the business remains the same.

We have described ourselves for a long time as the airports of the internet. We are hubs where a lot of traffic comes in and is distributed to other parts of the world. That is certainly true in Texas. We acquired Infomart in 2017, which is one of the most interconnected buildings in the United States. We also acquired our Houston business through Verizon’s data center assets.

Today, we distribute internet traffic not just around Texas or the United States, but around the world. As of 2026, we have more than 280 data centers in over 70 metros globally.

Oil and gas is a key industry for us, not just in Texas but also in markets like Australia, where mining and resources are major industries. It is one of the industries most likely to be disrupted significantly by AI. When you think about predictive maintenance, exploration, and drilling, there is a huge amount of data that requires significant machine learning capabilities. It is an industry that is particularly well-suited to benefit from AI early on.

That goes beyond oil and gas. Texas has an incredibly lucrative economy, and financial services is another important industry. There are many significant financial services companies in Texas, and that sector is also well-positioned as we think about cybersecurity, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies.

How do Equinix’s Houston and Dallas facilities fit into the company’s broader interconnection strategy?

We are focused on core interconnection hubs. In the United States, Dallas is one of the top hub markets. We also have edge facilities, and Houston fits more into that category.

As we distribute data around the world, it is important for that data to be as close as possible to companies’ customers, users, and employees. Houston is a great example of a market that is important in its own right but is also adjacent to a core interconnection hub like Dallas. Both markets are important as we think about Texas.

How is Equinix balancing its sustainability commitments with the growing energy demands of hyperscale and AI-driven workloads?

In 2019, we made a commitment that 100% of the energy we consume in our data centers worldwide would be supported by renewable energy. As of today, we are at 96% of that goal, with four years remaining. In the United States, we are already at 100%.

We remain committed to those targets. They are science-based targets, and we are focused on decreasing not only our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions but also our Scope 3 indirect emissions by working with our partners and supply chain.

Are you seeing increased collaboration between Equinix and energy companies around digital infrastructure and grid innovation?

Energy is a much larger consideration in site selection than it was 10 years ago. The most effective market expansions and entries happen through partnerships with utilities, regulators, and public utility commissions.

We take a multi-pronged approach as we expand in a market like Dallas. We partner closely with utility providers and share a similar roadmap. Equinix has been in the data center business for a long time, so we have a predictable line of sight into our demand and growth. That allows us to work closely with utilities, which also take a long-term view, and align with them on our expansion plans.

How is Equinix adapting infrastructure standards to support high-density AI workloads while maintaining efficiency and uptime?

Our data center design principles have been the same for 27 years. All mechanical and electrical systems have backup systems, and that remains the case.

One of the biggest shifts happening in the data center industry is the move to liquid cooling. If you think about the air conditioner in your car versus having a cold shower, the air conditioner is how data centers have been cooled for a long time. But as GPUs and AI workloads run hotter, we need different technology to cool those chips and CPUs.

The data center industry is doing that in partnership with customers through liquid cooling. We support liquid cooling in many facilities around the world, and as we build new facilities, a higher percentage of customers will adopt it. Liquid cooling is far more efficient than air cooling, so we can support higher growth while improving efficiency over time.

What are the biggest shifts you are seeing in customer requirements when they choose colocation sites such as Houston and Dallas?

As customers adopt AI within their organizations, their requirements are changing. They are changing in terms of the mix of technology they use, including adopting GPUs instead of relying only on CPUs.

That is driving architecture changes, including the move toward liquid cooling. We are also seeing an incredibly strong appetite for speed. Customers that may have had a one-year roadmap to lay out an architecture, deploy it, and turn up services now want to do that in weeks or a month or two. Customers are pushing the industry at a speed we have not seen before.

How is Equinix helping enterprises transition from legacy on-premise environments to hybrid architecture?

A significant percentage of workloads still reside in traditional corporate data centers. That might mean an office building with a computer room on one of the floors.

The natural migration from those environments, which are often old and not fit for purpose, is toward data centers and cloud providers. That is accelerated further when you move into higher-density workloads that require liquid cooling. Office buildings are simply not designed for that, and it is helping accelerate migration into data centers like Equinix.

The other important piece, particularly in Dallas, is the hybrid workload. A customer may have a database where certain portions operate better in a cloud environment, while other portions, such as memory, should remain on-premise. Equinix can provide a hybrid solution where proprietary data sits in a database inside Equinix, and the customer uses the cloud only where needed. We have all the major cloud providers on our campus in Dallas, so hybrid architecture is something we help facilitate.

How do you evaluate whether to acquire or build new data centers in key markets?

We have completed more than 30 acquisitions over the last 27 years. We have grown through a balance of acquisitions and greenfield expansion.

Once we are present in a market, we generally grow organically. That means we acquire land, design, build, and operate the facility. Where appropriate, we use acquisition as a growth enabler. We are constantly evaluating the right fit around the world and assessing acquisition targets where they make sense. It is a mix of determining the right market entry strategy and understanding our growth within that market.

What role will regional hubs like Houston and Dallas play in supporting edge computing, latency-sensitive applications, and distributed AI infrastructure?

Dallas is one of our top three or four hubs in the United States and probably sits within the top six or seven globally. That is only going to accelerate as the need for compute increases and as network demand increases alongside it.

Dallas is going to continue to grow, and as the Houston economy continues to grow, the need for digital infrastructure to support that will also increase. That infrastructure will be connected from Dallas and will also exist within the Houston metro. I expect to see significant growth in both markets over the next five to 10 years.