Lifetime of Achievement: Charles J. Meyers

January 31, 2024

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Charles J. Meyers

Data Centre Magazine honours President and CEO of Equinix, Charles J. Meyers, and His Commitment to Creating the Data Centre Infrastructure of the Future

Partnering with more than 10,000 Equinix colleagues worldwide, Charles J. Meyers is committed to the new era of the data centre.

Through his work as President and CEO, Meyers has led the doubling of global IBX data centres, evolving the capabilities of Platform Equinix, building ecosystems with thousands of the world’s leading businesses as customers and quadrupling revenues during his tenure.

His experience in data centre development and innovating for the future of the digital age are all part of his ethos with Equinix to become a trusted provider within a new cloud-first world.

Following the curve of digital transformation

Based in the United States, Meyers earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado. He also holds dual Master’s degrees from Northwestern University’s J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and McCormick Graduate School of Engineering.

Throughout his career, Meyers has worked at leading companies like Verisign, Level 3 Communications and BellSouth in prominent IT positions. He joined Equinix in 2010 and holds more than 25 years of experience in executive leadership positions at leading technology and IT companies.

Continually serving customers, partners, shareholders and communities across Equinix operations, Meyers has helped shape company strategy and continued industry leadership. Prior to his CEO position, he worked for the company as President of Strategy, Services and Innovation, as well as Chief Operating Officer (COO).

He is now responsible for leading Equinix’s strategy and innovation, with a continued track record of growth, execution and service excellence. He partners with thousands of Equinix colleagues to be in service to one another as well as the customers, partners, shareholders and communities in which Equinix operates.

Interconnecting the digital economy with AI

Charles J. Meyers is leading Equinix’s appetite for AI, ultimately recognising the importance of utilising AI technology ethically and ensuring that it delivers positive outcomes for users.

“We are a fundamental enabler of AI,” he said in an interview with Forbes. “I think that AI is one of the most powerful driving forces of digital transformation today.”

Moving further into 2024, Meyers sees the value of AI as advancing the ‘new wave’ of digital transformation. Citing the cloud and the pandemic as helping to fuel the demand for new technology, he is working hard to ensure that Equinix holds enough data centre capacity to power its customers as demand only continues to rise.

The data centre company works with the likes of Zscaler and NVIDIA who are at the forefront of their industries and use Equinix infrastructure in order to innovate further.

Equinix also supports major liquid cooling technologies, including direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers so that customers can take advantage of the most efficient solutions. With AI being leveraged for cooling systems, Equinix has been public about wanting to cut energy usage by 48% by optimising energy supply needed to cool data centre infrastructure.

Equinix, colocation and an appetite for liquid cooling

Equinix is often described as connecting places, partners and possibilities. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the company continues to specialise in Internet connection and data centres, as well as global colocation.

The company amped up its progress in 2023, becoming one of the largest data centre providers in Europe. It also announced a new hyperscale data centre in South Korea which is hoping to launch in Q1 2024. Given that more businesses are now requiring hybrid multi-cloud sites, this new facility aims to offer solutions for increasing amounts of AI hardware with power, specialised cooling abilities and networking.

“I am more concerned about supply than I am about demand,” Meyers said in an interview with CNBC, recognising that AI is “one of many” sources of growth for the company. However, he is also keen to note that “the broader source of growth for [the company] is digital transformation as a phenomenon.”

Under Meyers’ leadership, Equinix is working to support direct-to-chip liquid cooling to power compute-intensive workloads like AI. It is supporting advanced liquid cooling technologies for more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres worldwide.