5 days Ago By Simon Sharwood
Datacenter giant Equinix will end its foray into infrastructure-a-service by shuttering its “Metal” bare metal IaaS offering. The genesis of Equinix’s service was its 2020 acquisition of bare metal hosting upstart Packet, which later than year was relaunched as “Equinix Metal” and rented x86 and Arm servers. At the time, Equinix told The Register it believed customers of its interconnect and network function virtualization services would appreciate to run servers in the company’s facilities – as doing so could mean they can deploy workloads wherever Equinix operates and take advantage of the org’s fat pipes to move data at high speeds.
The company therefore saw Metal as a value add to its colocation offerings. Those strategies appear not to have worked because, as first reported by DCD, Equinix has informed customers that the service will cease in June 2026. Equinix confirmed the report and offered The Register the following comment: Equinix is moving towards the end-of-life for our bare metal as a service product as we focus on the growth and acceleration of parts of our business, like colocation, interconnection, and hyperscale.
There is no immediate impact on existing Equinix Metal customers under contract; they can continue to use Metal as usual and will see no degradation to their support or care experience. Closures like this are nearly always due to losses – and red ink is not hard to find when creating hyperscale services that require big up-front investments before revenue arrives. Equinix’s rivals can fund their own builds with strong cashflow from their high-margin cloud operations.
That strategy has seen the likes of Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Oracle embark on datacenter building sprees – and every time they open a datacenter it increases the likelihood it will be either collocated with, or not many milliseconds away from, and Equinix facility. Bare metal boxen in an Equinix bit barn are therefore likely less attractive when the cloud you already use isn’t far away – especially given many orgs already struggle to manage infrastructure sprawled across multiple IaaS suppliers. Equinix’s decision to quit Metal therefore leaves the major clouds unchallenged – a state of affairs that seems unlikely to change as the likes of OVF and Digital Ocean haven’t grown to a point at which they threaten industry behemoths.
At least Equinix isn’t alone in having tried, and failed, to do cloud: HPE , Cisco , and VMware all failed in their attempts to create hyperscale services. Equinix can also console itself because it does decent business hosting hyperscalers’ infrastructure – and with demand for datacenters growing fast thanks to the generative AI boom, its customers are likely to want more space for the foreseeable future. ®.
