We get started. I'm Jon Atkin with RBC. I'm pleased to welcome Equinix for the next 25-30 minutes for a fireside chat with Charles Meyers, President and Chief Executive Officer. Welcome, Charles. Thanks, Jon. Good to see you. You might want to make some safe harbor comments. Yep. Thank you for that opportunity. So, I don't get in hot water with my IR team. So, some of what we'll say will be forward-looking in nature, and so if you want, check out our riveting safe harbor disclosure statements on our IR website. Maybe starting with some corporate topics from kind of a staffing standpoint. Adam has recently been brought on, Scott a little bit earlier. Karl has departed. Yep. So, what's changed overall in Digital Services, first of all, since Scott is now into his role for, I forget, maybe a year now, or? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a little over a year. Yeah. Just, he just turned over his one-year anniversary. So, I think he's been a fantastic addition to the team. You know, very much brought the things that I think we were looking for, and I think has now set about in terms of building the additional capabilities and team he needs. So he's added a number of critical players to his team. You know, on the Digital Services side, we're delivering a lot of more software-enabled products. And so I think that, you know, the ability to build at scale, agile software development organizations is a key part of that. And I think, you know, Scott has really brought in some critical talent to help us do that. And so, that's progressing very well, and I think we continue to feel good about our long-term, you know, prospects on the Digital Services side and how that will contribute to the platform, and so we can talk about that if you like. Adam is a relatively new addition, and he is a boomerang, one of many. He left Equinix about eight years ago, had a senior role in the marketing organization inside of Equinix, and then went on to spend a number of years at Google Cloud and then Atlassian, and so really brings that blend of, you know, sort of, you know, being able to understand our traditional direct field selling motion, but also now bringing the, you know, some of the capabilities around really accelerating our channel go-to-market motion, as well as our, you know, more product-led growth motion with on the Digital Services side of things. So, so great addition, and I think we continue to have a great team that's positioned well and, you know, to execute on the opportunity ahead. And I think we've had a history of having, you know, great people. This has been a fun week to see a whole bunch of Equinix alumni scattered across the industry, and so it's been good. I was just gonna ask, there's some folks in the room, and maybe they'll be boomerangs over time. We'll see what the future holds. So, but yeah, it's, you know, sometimes it's a matter of people getting great opportunities, and sometimes it's people's personal circumstances and, you know, and so, but it is always, always wonderful to see, Equinix people around the industry. So want to hit on energy prices, taking into account your hedging pricing, hedging program, macro conditions. What's your sense of power prices and how they're trending across the portfolio? What are the implications for customers and for your margins over the coming quarters? Yeah, I think, I think, power prices have stabilized to some meaningful degree. They're less, less volatile than they were last year, although I will say no guarantees that stays that way, right? You know, I mean, I think it's, especially since there are, you know, dynamics on the, in the global, on the global landscape that I think can disrupt that at any time. And so, but, but I would say right now, I think we're seeing a, a period of sort of more stability, and as a result, we've been sort of hedging into sort of new, more stabilized rates. You know, exactly where we land in terms of our hedge price, you know, across markets is still sort of being, being determined. But, I think we'll, you know, we, we may see some markets where we, contrary to last year, where we saw these big increases, we may actually see decreases in some markets. We may actually see, further increases in some markets and sort of some stay more the same. So overall, I would say, you know, one of the things that we made very clear at the, at the Analyst Day was that we, we felt it was important to just sort of not think about that as an underlying sort of value driver in the business. Because the, the PPIs are really kind of pass-through revenue. They're, they're zero calorie, as we, as we talked about it. And so, you know, we'll give you growth rates that are normalized against that and sort of also manage that. Because I do think if we saw, you know, sort of some decreases, for example, go through in certain markets, it could reduce the amount of zero-calorie revenue that's there, and therefore, improve the reported margins. But that's not really real value creation, and so we'll normalize the results so you can see in that. But I do think things are stabilizing a bit, and I think the situation with our customers is in a good spot, and I don't think that'll be a major impact on the business. You've had prior periods where you tweaked or harmonized your cross-connect pricing. On cabinet pricing, can you just kind of refresh us on your typical enterprise retail relationship, maybe kind of three-year or tenor, but like auto renewals, month to month, year to year, what's the step up that you typically see? Sure. Any changes that you might consider tweaking, given what's happening with demand in the market? Yes. Typically, we, you know, we contract typically on a three to five-year basis, typically with an auto renew. We do auto renew with a lot of our customers. I will say that in more volatile inflationary environments, it becomes a little less common for you to just straight auto renew because oftentimes there's a discussion about pricing. But, and then, of course, our contracts almost all include annual escalators. We had traditionally talked about those being in the 3%-5% range, but I think we're seeing meaningful uplift on those to larger numbers and some increased level of use of index-based escalators. Although that typically is reserved more for our, you know, typically much larger investors. So it seems just based on your disclosure around cabinet adds and churn rates, if you gross it up to get to kind of a gross number, that trend does seem to have slowed a bit sequentially over the last three, even four quarters. It's not a steep decline, but appears to be within normal levels of fluctuation in the business, or there are fundamental operating factors to think about that might underlie that slowdown? Yeah, cab adds was definitely a topic of discussion on the last call. One of the things we've always told people is that there's volatility in it based on timing of installs and churn and various other factors. So we've always encouraged people to really take a four-quarter rolling and then look at the trend line on that. And I think when you do that, it's reasonably stable. There is some pressures, though, and I think they are they're a couple-fold. One is churn, but much of that, as we've talked about, being sort of a proactive or a favorable churn activity, where we're recovering capacity in tight markets, where we believe we can, you know, sort of re-market that or resell that at a substantial premium. On the last call, we talked about, you know, and again, we were very careful to make, you know, not sort of have this extrapolate to the entire portfolio, but we had 37 deployments that were, you know, sort of saw, you know, that were sort of churning out, that we were seeing, had already experienced and realized or expected to realize uplift of, you know, 50%-70%. And so obviously, there's some really material gains to be had there, and that's real value creation for the business. And so even though you see some vacancy and a little bit of pressure on cabinet additions, we think that's net value creating for the business, and so have been active in that area. And then the last thing I would say is, I do think there is a trend line, you know, and one that might be accelerated to some meaningful degree by AI for around higher densities. And of course, higher densities mean that you can get, you know, sort of more kilowatts, you know, per cap. And so, so I think that, you know, the cab adds isn't necessarily reflective of the underlying growth there, because, you know, kilowatt, kilowatts are probably the better. And that's also having a favorable impact on MRR per cab, which again, continues to trend very, very positively. Very, very good point. Customer decision timeframes, closing rates, any, any kind of update, or points you want to reiterate? Yeah, I think, you know, generally we're seeing that, you know, our close rates, deal cycle times, et cetera, are kind of pretty much in line with historical norms. I did, you know, one of the things that I do when I'm at these events or any of my travel around the world, I almost always take time, in fact, I think I missed the dinner last night because I was with our local sales team, because I was trying to plug into what they're hearing out there. And I would say, you know, generally, it's a, I think about the sort of commitment to digital, how people are thinking about their digital infrastructure. You know, but I think also a level of caution. I think in particular on in enterprise decision makers around sort of macroeconomic concerns, et cetera, and so, and budgetary. So I think it's overall I think continue to feel really good. I think the most important thing that I think about is if we had some measure of our relevance to people's sort of long-term, sort of digital agenda and their and their needs on the digital infrastructure side. I feel like we are becoming more and more relevant to what they want to accomplish, and I think that bodes well for our long-term prospects. Turning to xScale, how are upstream factors such as energy supply, transmission capacity, affecting your development pipeline versus what you contemplated, you know, back in the early years when it was called HIT? Yeah. Wow, wow! That's something to. Yeah. But yeah, because I think it, not even, not this last analyst day and not the one before it, but the one before that, is probably when we rolled it out. And I think if you go back to that, and you look at what we had talked about, about the likely aspirations and scale of xScale, which again, I don't know yet whether we called it that, then, sort of executed at a multiple of that. Meaningfully larger than what we had originally anticipated. And so. And I think that over the next several years, I think we have an opportunity to further accelerate our aspirations in that area based on demand that's out there. And so, the exact structure under which we'll do that and, you know, how we'll do that with capital partners, because we certainly don't want to expose our balance sheet to all of that or use our balance sheet firepower in that way. But we do think there's a big opportunity. We think it's important for us to continue to be at-scale player in the supply chain. We think that being that partner for many of our really large and strategic customers is important. And so I think that we are gonna see, you know, it be a bigger, you know, a meaningfully larger operation and overall validate it. It probably will have. You know, it's not gonna have as big an impact on the revenues per se, but I do think we're gonna continue to invest there. And back to the sort of your question, I do think power is a very real, you know, if you, as I walk around the last couple of days here and hear what people are talking about, it's a topic of significant discussion. And when you just look at, particularly on the xScale side, you know, the aggregate amount of demand for power that's out there, there's just gonna have to be some, you know, something's gotta give, so to speak. And so I think thinking about where power is available and that influencing location strategies is gonna be a very real thing. I also think people are gonna, you know, I think on-site power generation of some sort is gonna have to continue to be part of the answer going forward. But a lot of the constraints are in, not limited to, but a lot of them are in established internet gateway type locations. Right. with AI training arguably being less- Correct. -location-sensitive, are those opportunities that you see suitable for xScale, or do you want to stick- No. with more of a tethering strategy? Yeah, I've answered that question in a few different venues, and I've said, you know, I think we are open to the reality or the possibility, or maybe the possibility or the reality that, you know, if we want to continue to target some of these strategic workloads and opportunities, that there may be that it wouldn't probably all be in the immediately adjacent to our existing markets. And so, I think we have more work to do on that in terms of exactly what it means, but I think it could include markets that have not been in our traditional sweet spot. Any inorganic growth opportunities to accelerate your xScale growth path? Yeah, I think. Look, I mean, we've been extremely successful with M&A over the years, with some people in the room that have helped on that, over the years. And so, and I think, I think M&A will continue to be a very relevant piece of our overall strategy, and, and that- I don't think that would be, necessarily limited to, to retail. But, obviously, it would, it, it's- there's a little more complexity to it in the xScale side, just because of the capital structure. But I do think that could absolutely be an opportunity to accelerate that business in, in certain locations around the world. Any kind of update on your xScale as a destination for xScale? Yeah. So I do think, you know, as I 'cause, you know, I mean, when we originally announced this, and probably even for the several years after that, I had generally sort of signaled a reluctance on the US in particular. Obviously, we've announced other projects in the Americas, including Brazil and Mexico, and I think there'll be more. But the U.S., I think we have been, had been quite reluctant in that. I didn't feel like, one, it was a I think an incredibly competitive market, and two, I think you know, the incremental strategic gains that I think were there available to us were different. I think now as we look at it, I think it is potentially more attractive for us, or is more attractive, and I think that we will be looking at expansion in the U.S., and I think we're sorting through exactly what those markets are and really have a lot of activity already underway. So AI, very, very rapidly evolving segment or segments. What have you learned since the Analyst Day around how Equinix participates in, in that ecosystem? Yeah, and I definitely think you're right to put the S on the end of that, because AI, I think, is a very broad set of things. I do draw some parallels between, I think, cloud, in particular, you know, the public cloud, sort of, momentum that was in the market, you know, and that really accelerated into almost a vertical climb five years ago, and has continued to be a major driving force in the overall macro demand for data centers, particularly on the sort of hyperscale side of things. And AI has a bit of a similar problem, but I think both businesses. We were talking about this yesterday, actually, it was some folks and I about that it is, 'cause cloud has this sort of multi-tiered architecture element to it, right? Which is you have the availability zone type requirements, which are look, you know, a lot of people shooting at that target, including us on the xScale side. But then you have cloud on-ramps, you have network nodes, and our retail business has really been much more focused on those elements of the architecture. Similarly, on AI, I think you have these large-scale service provider-driven training requirements, which tend to dominate the media landscape. But I think, I think over time, will actually not be the bigger part of the overall demand profile, as, you know, as inference becomes significantly more prominent and as enterprise AI, I think, is built on top of large language models and people are building training. And so I think that, I think we'll be active in all those areas, more on the, on the large scale training side, more with xScale, but then on inference and, and some of the enterprise AI on the retail side, which, by the way, we've been serving those demands for our customers for years. And, and there's lots of great examples of AI, and how it's being used effectively by our customers. But I do, I do think it's a, it's a big opportunity for us, and it's, it's interesting because I think that the, the, right now, the media frenzy is more around GPU availability and power, which I understand, and, and we've talked about it some here. I think the bigger and more relevant long-term questions for AI is: What data do I need where to create what value for what users, and how do I monetize them? And how do I monetize it or gain a return- get a return on it? And those are the conversations that we're having every day with customers, particularly around the data side. Where is our. Where should my data be? How do I need to distribute it as I, you know, as I look at inference, et cetera? And I think we have a really distinctive, you know, value proposition in that regard. So apart from AI business as usual, 'cause you make a good point, it's not, it's not a new thing, but the, the changes that you even, even I think, alluded to on the last one, impacts to think about in terms of, cabinet growth or, or interconnect growth? Yeah, I think it's actually I think its biggest impact will be on kilowatts, right? Mm-hmm. You know, but I and I, I'd probably see it more, it's more cabinet growth. I do think AI will be also one of many things that continue to look, the ecosystems have always been at the center of our strategy, right? And the interconnection amongst those ecosystems. And I think that, that's gonna be the case in AI as well. But I do think the AI demand will, as people look at enterprise AI and private AI, you know, combined with sort of what they might do, with public cloud and other players, I think is gonna, you know, will drive some real demand for, you know, for cabinets and kilowatts and, and associated interconnection, but I think it might be even more heavy on the kilowatt side. Thank you. And then bare metal, any kind of update on recent trends, the growth path you see, customer demand and maybe the relative emphasis you're placing on that unit? Yeah, I think it. Look, I think we continue to be, you know, the underlying sort of rationale for the acquisition of Packet a few years ago. I think very much still firmly entrenched and in place. I think, you know, if you look at Packet at the time of acquisition, they were really much more focused on digitally native customers, and we continue to serve some of those types of customers. But I think that the bigger opportunity for us is a belief that the enterprise is gonna see dedicated, automated infrastructure as a real opportunity and part of the overall puzzle in terms of how they architect their infrastructure long term. And I think we're in the earlier stages of both service provider and enterprise customers doing that. But I think we're seeing good momentum. As I said, I mean, Digital Services, broadly speaking, is growing at 3x the rate of our broader portfolio. And we are really thinking about the metal offering as foundational to the platform over time. And so, in fact, we're replatforming our, you know, our Network Edge offering onto metal. You know, so it will be the underlying compute platform there, which is probably where we should have started, but, you know, we were anxious to get to market and, you know, so we're sort of getting, you know, doing some retooling there. But I think there's, you know, a lot of optimism there, longer term. But I do think it's something that the customers are really starting to get their heads around, and they love the on-demand nature of it, they love the CapEx-light nature of it, and they love the fact that they don't need to deal with the lifecycle management of technology. Maybe hitting on some financial questions. First off, with stabilized organic growth and what are kind of the ranges to think about over the next couple of years? Yeah. Yeah, I think we I mean, obviously, Q2 was sort of a bang-up quarter in that regard. It was 10%, but of course, 300 basis points of that was on PPI, power pricing increases. So adjusted for that, at 7%, still well above the 3%-5% that we have traditionally guided to. And I think that's driven by, you know, some pricing, you know, pricing and density are probably the two biggest factors in that. And so I would continue to see a level of strength there. You know, we haven't necessarily adjusted that range, but we've sort of been above it for the last several quarters, and I do think that, I think the stabilized assets will perform well, one, because of rising densities, and two, because of, you know, continued strength in pricing, and three, because of interconnection. And then on AFFO per share growth, you know, you have a very attractive multi-year growth path. But you know, what are some of the operational or macro factors to consider, other than some of the obvious ones like FX, but you know, that would drive you towards the lower versus higher end of the range? Well, you know, I mean, we talked about obviously one understands a well understood "headwind" in the business is the rising rates and what that implies on our maturity towers when those are sort of renegotiated, et cetera. But that's all worked into the guide, and so I think, you know, something that we fully understand, and I think that investors sort of, you know, have a clear grasp around. You know, and then I think we have to continue to drive operating leverage in the business. And I think that's a priority for us. Obviously, we've got to drive the revenue growth, and I think the opportunity is out there for that. I think the product portfolio has evolved, increasingly relevant to what the customer is trying to accomplish. So, you know, revenue growth is gonna be a key factor driving operating leverage. And then there are gonna be some of those, you know, below the lines. We sort of had more of a tailwind on below the line, if you will, on the AFFO share when we were renegotiating it all on the, on the way down on interest rates. And we're just gonna have to fight that wind a little bit on the way up on some of the maturity towers, but I think that's well understood. So on top-line growth, and when we think about the sales engine, any particular verticals that, you know, you would want to lean further into any particular types of, salespeople to, to kind of bring on board? Yeah. in order to generate new logos or enhance share of wallet within existing logos? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we've seen broad, you know, broad momentum in our business. I think both our service provider business and our enterprise business continue to be very strong. On the service provider business, I think it's more driven by, you know, sort of cloud providers and, quote, "cloud providers," when I and I mean that by cloud writ large, right? Everything as a service, software as a service, security as a service, X as a service, anything that's being consumed in these cloud-based consumption models. I think as those providers think about deploying infrastructure to meet global demand, Equinix is an incredibly logical place to do that. And anybody who needs, you know, sort of broad-based, multi-cloud connectivity, Equinix is a driving force there. In terms of, you know, and so service provider continues to be a key part of it. In terms of enterprise verticals, I think, you know, we continue to see, you know, strength across a range of industries, but anybody where digital seems to be an increasingly relevant means of differentiation in the market is a place of strength for us. So, we see financial services, you know, continue to be very strong. We see retail actually continue to be very strong, despite, you know, sort of macro pressures that people were fearing would, you know, sort of have the consumer keeping their wallet in their pocket more. But look, retail - digital is a matter of survival in retail. And so, you know, we've seen a strong degree of commitment to digital transformation, to AI, et cetera. And so in fact, I talk a lot about an AI use case of a retailer really, you know, combining weather data with inventory data, with logistics data, to try to figure out where to ship, you know, flowers to maximize demand on any given week, or maximize revenue on any given weekend. That sounds like a really silly, but it is a lot of money at stake. And it's a great example of kind of how this comes to play. So good strength across our ecosystems and across the. We see, you know, newer ecosystems like connected vehicle, you know, as an area of strength, and ecosystems are going to continue to be a major part of the strategy. Audience questions. Santiago? So, given that xScale is available in more locations now, or at least announced, where will you see the, and you're keeping a separate strategy and facilities, where will you see the boundary in your system, retail, enterprise, even with the MSPs business, that every time the deals are becoming larger from either the enterprise or the MSPs that could cross. Yes. In scale or vice versa, given the capacity or space constraints? That we're kind of evolving our approach to, but there are definitely deals that we had historically taken in retail that have increased to a size that now feels more appropriate to place in xScale. And so, again, it probably depends a little bit on the capacity situation. And I would say that there are some traditional workloads that just are increasing in size. But if they still are heavily dependent on proximity to the ecosystem, they still maybe are best suited in the retail facility, but at more retail price points. And so that's a bit of the dynamic that we're navigating. I do think that the aperture, or the lens that we view xScale through, in terms of which customers we would be targeting as potential xScale customers, needs another click out, right? You know, the reality was, it was mostly the, you know, sort of the top five or six hyperscalers, that. In fact, the ones that actually are driving the, that we've actually sold to, really represent that group. But I think there's another click of sort of at scale providers. And I think there's even going to be, you know, potentially some level of enterprise demand that may be appropriate, for xScale, particularly for things like large scale AI training, et cetera. And so it's going to be a bit of a moving target for us, but I think something that we will need to continue to navigate carefully. Here's what I would say, though, at the end, is it's got to be about the customer. Even though, of course, we're a for-profit enterprise and we're trying to do what's good for us, the way over the long term to do that is to have a deep understanding of what's truly good for the customer, and then be willing to do that, right? You know, and the business to that reality. That's why, you know, I always 'cause like, for example, I always say to sellers, you know, it would be really silly for us to go and say, "No, you shouldn't put workloads in the public cloud. Just put them in colo," right? You know, and the reality is, you just have to say, look, I always use the phrase, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." It's, you know, you gotta say, you know, "Look, if it's really well fit for that, for that, then you should do that," and we'll just provide the continuum of offerings. And so that's why I love the being able to have the xScale, scaled retail and Digital Services, that full portfolio, and then go and say, "Hey, choose from our portfolio as best meets your needs." There's considerable execution risk in building the data center, specifically the risk of the build, hyperscalers are expecting higher and higher density. How are you thinking about that risk and how to use it? Yeah. Well, you're right. There's, there is real risk there. And it's, I, I think we are able to manage it more effectively on a relative basis because of our scale, because of entrenched relationships, et cetera, because that often is, you know, and, and it was probably, probably a period of time where it was even more complicated because of, COVID and, and the implications of that, and, and labor, and those other things. I think we're seeing a little bit of stabilization around that, so but it's something we spend a lot of time and attention on. I think it's, you know, part of it is, I think, it really just making sure that you built a presence in the supply chain, broadly speaking, that gives you higher degrees of confidence, and it's about experience. I mean, I think that, you know, there is a certain value in accumulated experience, and we have a lot of it. And so, I think there is risk there, and we've got to manage it very carefully, but I think in relative terms, I think we're in really good shape there. You mentioned on-site power generation. Yeah. Increasing work going forward. What are you seeing as the best way to do that, if that's like a gas turbine or what? Yeah, both are relevant options. We actually use fuel cells with gas-fueled fuel cells in several locations now and even as a primary source of power. So, we do that in Dublin because it's, you know, the power situation in Ireland is pretty acute. And, so that's a, I think. So I think there's gonna be a variety of technologies that are relevant over time. I actually think over time nuclear is probably gonna be part of the answer as well. SMR is probably in terms of, you know, so those are technologies that I think we have to continue to track and understand and deploy when appropriate. But I do think it would be silly for us to believe that, you know, that the grid is gonna, as it currently exists, is gonna really solve for the entire need, right? You know, and so, but then you sort of overlap the need for power with the sustainability challenges, and so I think you have to deal with that. And I think that even there, there's a little bit of a, you know, 'cause the question is, does it need to be renewable, and what's really renewable? And, you know, 'cause, you know, you could do fuel cells with carbon sequestration and be zero carbon, actually. That's not theoretically renewable, but I think that we're gonna have to be pragmatic as an industry, I think, and as a globe about how to, you know, address some of these issues. And so I think there's gonna be a range of things, but it's certainly we also have the, you know, the luxury, if you will, as a company. We actually have a number of power experts that are on staff that work at Equinix now. And I think that's an area we'll continue to invest in. And of course, we use outside advisors as well, but I think we got to continue to be smart on that, and it's definitely gonna be an area of continued 'cause I think it is gonna be a source of probably of you know, at a minimum, risk mitigation and maybe differentiation over time. We are out of time. Appreciate your answering all the questions. My pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it.