Today Equinix has opened its much-heralded eight-story AM4 data center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a week after opening a new facility in Frankfurt. 

The 12-story building will have eight floors of data space, and was opened by His Royal Highness Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands. The $113 million building, which will cost up to $190 million when fully built out, has been built on a vacant lot next to existing Equinix data centers in Amsterdam’s Science Park.The $92m Frankfurt data center will be the provider’s sixth in that city. 

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Equinix AM4 Amsterdam – Equinix

Launching a flagship

Equinix already has data centers in Amsterdam numbered up to AM8, thanks to the acquisition of Telecity data centers in 2015, but the new facility has been labeled AM4 for some years during the planning process. 

Equinix has told DCD that now 80 percent of data in the Netherlands will flow through one of the several Equinix International Business Exchanges (IBXs) in Amsterdam, which in turn connect to AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) – the largest Internet exchange in the world.

The 230-foot building will have space for 1,550 cabinets in its first phase and 4,200 when fully built out, with a usable floor space of 124,000 sq ft (11,500 sq m). Equinix calculates that fiber connections from Amsterdam Science Park can reach 80 percent of Europe in less than 50ms.

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Equinix AM4 Amsterdam – Equinix

The Netherlands is the fourth most advanced digital economy in the EU, according to the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2017. The country has connections to more than 150 global submarine cables networks and contains one of the densest network concentrations in the world; 80 percent of Europe is only 50 milliseconds away by fiber, according to Equinix.

“With its connectivity to continental Europe as well London and the Nordics, Amsterdam has become a key hub for cloud and other service providers to offer enterprise interconnection,” said Penny Jones, senior analyst, European services at 451 Research. ”A deployment in a network-dense interconnection-oriented facility such as that being offered in Amsterdam could be a viable option to support their digital transformation.”

Despite its size and central location at a global interconnection hub, Equinix is positioning AM4 as an edge facility, according to the blog post announcing the launch date.