Data centre company Equinix has announced the closure of its Equinix ‘Metal’ bare metal infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering.
View WhitepaperData centre company Equinix has announced the closure of its Equinix ‘Metal’ bare metal infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. This decision came after Equinix’s 2020 acquisition of Packet, a bare metal hosting start-up, which was later relaunched as ‘Equinix Metal’.
The service allowed customers to rent x86 and Arm servers within Equinix’s facilities, enabling them to deploy workloads across the company’s extensive global network. By integrating Metal with its interconnect and network function virtualisation services, Equinix hoped to attract customers looking to leverage its high-speed data transfer capabilities. However, despite these ambitions, the strategy seemingly didn’t deliver the expected returns.
Equinix’s decision to shutter Metal by June 2026 reflects broader challenges in competing with hyperscale cloud providers, particularly the 3 cloud giants such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. These tech giants have deep pockets and extensive cloud revenue streams, allowing them to expand rapidly and offer IaaS services that are often co-located close to Equinix facilities. This proximity reduces the appeal of managing bare metal servers in Equinix data centres, particularly for organisations already grappling with infrastructure across multiple IaaS providers.
The failure of Equinix Metal shows the difficulty of entering the hyperscale cloud space. Rivals such as DigitalOcean have also struggled to scale to a level anywhere near the three tech giants, meaning Equinix isn’t alone in this. Even previous attempts made by companies such as HPE, Cisco, and VMware to launch their own hyperscale services have fallen short.
Despite the setback, Equinix remains a leader in the data centre space, with a robust business hosting infrastructure for hyperscalers themselves. The ongoing rise in generative AI and the corresponding demand for data centre capacity ensure a bright future for the company’s co-location and interconnection services.
By doubling down on its core offerings, Equinix positions itself to capitalise on trends driving data centre growth, such as AI, edge computing, and increasing cloud adoption. This realignment will hopefully allow the company to play to its strengths while avoiding further investment in a service that was ultimately mismatched with its long-term goals.
The closure of Equinix Metal goes to show the dominance that hyperscale cloud providers have and the difficulty of competing in the IaaS space. With fewer businesses challenging the cloud giants, customers may face fewer options for niche or specialised IaaS solutions.
However, for those looking for bare metal and IaaS, we at Zeus Cloud can provide. With scalable and flexible infrastructure options, Zeus Cloud’s services can easily cater to businesses that have specific needs and requirements.
Zeus Cloud integrates with various tools and platforms, making it easier for companies to manage their infrastructure while benefiting from bare metal’s unmatched power and customisation, with enterprise-grade NVMe available for up to 16x faster speeds, and dual AMD EPYC 7643 48-Core Processors.
To learn more, get in touch with our team today.
