Opens Chicago data center expansion with over 50% of cabinets reserved.

Equinix, Inc., a provider of data centers and Internet exchange services, on Wednesday announced the opening of new data centers in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas.

Based on the results of a comprehensive worldwide demand study that Equinix recently conducted, these expansions will support the significant customer growth expected in Equinix's key markets. Equinix's 2006 data center openings and the planned builds in the Chicago and Washington, D.C. areas represent a 35% increase the company's cabinet capacity.

The opening of Equinix's expansion center in Chicago, adjacent to its current downtown Chicago Internet Business Exchange (IBX) center, adds approximately 1,100 cabinets to the existing IBX, which has become a principal hub for the Chicago region's growing financial trading exchange industry. 

"Driven by the proliferation of IP-based applications, from music downloads to content-rich web sites to businesses exchanging large amounts of data, the growth rate for colocation services nearly doubled in 2005, and is expected to experience double-digit growth in both 2006 and 2007 when the worldwide market is expected to comprise $3.5 billion," said Andy Schroepfer, Founder of Tier 1 Research.

"The announcements today reflect Equinix's commitment to invest in support of our customers' growth and further extends our market leadership position," said Peter Van Camp, CEO of Equinix. "With our IBX center openings in 2006 and our planned builds in the Washington, D.C. and Chicago markets, we will have increased our cabinet capacity by 35 percent."