“[Bare metal] is a much different business model than pure colocation with interconnection. So, at the end of the day, I imagine what likely happened was Equinix started looking at its growth trajectory and [its] margin on these services, then [realized] you know what? It doesn’t really make sense going forward,” he said.
It’s not hard to see why. Equinix was competing with HPE, IBM, Oracle, all of the big hyperscalers like AWS and Google, and dedicated bare-metal providers like Vultr.
MarketsAndMarkets says the bare-metal market will increase from an estimated $8.5 billion in 2023 to $19.1 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 17.4%. For that reason, Howard doesn’t believe it’s a reflection of the market, just that Equinix couldn’t make a go of it. “It just didn’t work for them,” he said.
