How Equinix wants the internet to be ready for the metaverse

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Equinix is one of the companies that provide the backbone of the internet, and it has more than 10,000 companies using its more than 240 datacenters around the world. And so it has a say in how we will build the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. 

Intel has said that the making the metaverse work in real time for billions of people will take a thousand times more computing power than we have today. That’s pretty intimidating, but to Equinix, this has been coming for a long time and the latest view of the metaverse is an evolution of the internet. Equinix has doubled the number of datacenters that it had a decade ago.

I talked with Matt George, director of digital transformation and GTM strategy at Equinix, about the technical challenges of building the metaverse. One of the big challenges is not bandwidth, which enables you to download a lot of data, but latency, which determines how fast your interactions can be. The metaverse isn’t really going to be the metaverse if we have high levels of latency. It has to be snappy.

Whether we can do this depends on the datacenters of the world. I’ve been inside one of Equinix’s datacenters, and they’re vast.

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Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: Tell us about your background and Equinix’s view of the metaverse.

Matt George: I’ve been at Equinix nine years, so I’ve