Equinix will end its bare metal Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering in June 2026. The company says it wants to focus on other areas.
By discontinuing its Metal IaaS offering, Equinix said to The Register that it wants to focus on other areas. These other areas include services around colocation, interconnection, and hyperscale services.
Today, other services, such as data center capacity for AI services, can be way more profitable. Stopping other services will free up more space in data centers and colocations for this purpose. In addition, bare metal services could also be costly. The Register further writes that investments in these types of hyperscale (cloud) services are often large, with no quick revenue from them.
Available from 2020
Bare metal IaaS services allow companies to get cloud-like hyperscale functionality through their own servers in data centers or in colocations. Through Equinix Metal, customers could deploy their workloads anywhere via leased Arm and x86 servers where the data center and colocation provider has a presence with data centers or colocations.
In doing so, they could use Equinix’s thick infrastructure to deliver all their services quickly. Equinix saw this, in particular, as a nice bonus in delivering its colocation services.
Equinix Metal has been around since 2020, when the data center and colocation provider bought the start-up Packet and started marketing its services under its own name. For the time being, current customers of the Equinix bare metal Metal service can continue to use the service as always.
Fewer and fewer bare metal IaaS services
That Equinix discontinues its bare metal IaaS service is not an isolated occurrence. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google are setting up their own data centers worldwide, which makes it for companies often cheaper and easier to purchase (cloud-based) IaaS services from these providers.
Earlier, tech giants such as Cisco, HPE, and VMware also stopped offering their own bare metal hyperscale services to their customers.
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