Equinix's Maryam Zand: Infrastructure Placement a Strategic Control Point for Enterprise AI
The next phase of enterprise AI will be determined not only by the model companies choose but by the architecture, infrastructure, and ecosystem they build around them. Maryam Zand, who leads AI ecosystem partnerships at Equinix, emphasizes that where you run AI is as strategic as what you run on it.
This means latency, performance, cost, and sovereignty are all determined by the decision of where to run AI, and these factors flow straight through to token economics. Infrastructure placement is one of the few levers a CXO controls in this complex landscape.
Equinix has been working with partners such as NVIDIA and Cisco to build out its footprint of over 280 data centers across 77 metros, with a focus on metro edge areas close to where users are and where data is generated. This design principle is behind Equinix's edge environments for AI.