(Telecompaper) Data centre company Equinix has announced a USD 1 billion joint venture with Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC to develop and operate xScale-branded data centres in Europe. The aim is to serve the unique core workload deployment needs of a targeted group of hyperscale cloud service providers including existing Equinix clients Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud rather than enter the wholesale market. Equinix said the facilities will be built on or close to some of its existing IBX campuses, allowing clients to increasingly embrace hybrid multicloud as the IT architecture of choice.