Digital infrastructure company Equinix has announced plans to build a brand-new data centre in the city of Salalah on the south coast of Oman.
The data centre is being built in cooperation with Omantel, a leading regional wholesale carrier, and will be commercially and operationally managed in full by Equinix as a carrier-neutral and open access Equinix International Business Exchange data centre.
The new site, called SN1, will be the second carrier-neutral data centre to be built in Oman after MC1 in Muscat, and will be Equinix’s fifth data centre in the region alongside sites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Once open, Equinix says, SN1 will become a key interconnectivity point for traffic flows between Asia, Europe, and Africa.
By shortening the length and route of many highly strategic and important cables in the region, Equinix says the new SN1 site in Salalah will change the landscape of global traffic flows by creating a much more cost-effective route to connect businesses to the Middle East.
The new site will also offer direct fibre links to MC1, and enable carriers, content providers and cloud providers to co-locate critical IT infrastructure in the region.
With access to several new and existing submarine cables, the SN1 facility is the latest in a string of strategic subsea-related investments for Equinix.
In December 2021, the company announced it had been selected by submarine cable infrastructure development specialist SUB.CO for the hosting of the 9,800-kilometre Oman-Australia Cable (OAC) into its International Business Exchange data centres in Perth and Muscat.
Additionally, during 2021, Equinix opened similar cable hosting sites in Genoa and Bordeaux as well as announcing the opening of significant subsea connections with EllaLink in Portugal and Brazil.
