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© History Oasis
1998-2005
In the early 1990s, Jay Adelson managed data centers at Digital Equipment Corporation. Boring work, until he spotted something others missed.
Competing networks needed a neutral ground to connect. No bias, no favoritism. Just clean handoffs of internet traffic. Adelson left DEC with colleague Al Avery to build exactly that.
They called the company Quark Communications at first. Bad name. So they changed it to Equinix. The idea stayed the same. Create spaces where the internet could work better.
While running Equinix, Adelson started a side project. It cost him $6,000. He called it Digg. It was social news before Twitter existed. Eventually, Digg got bigger than Equinix in his mind. He left Equinix in 2005 to run it full-time.
2000-2007
Peter Van Camp showed up at Equinix when everything was falling apart. The dot-com crash. Startups were dying weekly.
He brought experience from CompuServe. For thirteen years, he watched the internet grow from dial-up modems and bulletin boards. His military training from West Point helped, too. Crisis management was just another drill.
In 2002, Equinix was broke. Van Camp engineered a three-way merger with Pihana Pacific and i-STT. It turned into a messy deal, with complex paperwork. But it worked. The company lived on to fight another day.
Van Camp stepped down as CEO in 2007. But he never really left. He kept his Executive Chairman’s desk right next to whoever ran things next.
2007-2018
Steve Smith turned Equinix into a buying machine.
He came from HP’s services division, where he’d learned to acquire companies without breaking them. Smith saw opportunity everywhere—Europe, Asia, Latin America. Revenue went from $400 million to over $4 billion during his run.
His biggest deal? Verizon’s data centers for $3.5 billion. A massive move in the space.
His leadership worked wonders until January 2018. Something happened with him and an employee. The company never explained what happened. Smith never talked about it publicly. But his career was ruined overnight.
2018 - Interim
Peter Van Camp stepped back in as the Interim CEO like he’d never left.
For eleven years as Executive Chairman, he’d stayed involved in every major decision. The transition was seamless. Circumstances were awkward, but the work continued.
He ran things for several months while the board found Smith’s replacement. Some executives never really retire. They just change business cards.
2018-2024
Meyers had been climbing the corporate ladder since 2010. Leading Equinix’s Americas region first. Then COO. Then Head of Strategy. When Smith left, Meyers was the obvious choice.
He understood Equinix’s future wasn’t just connecting networks. It was creating infrastructure for cloud computing. The foundation on which everything else is built.
For six years, Meyers was CEO. He doubled the data centers. And quadrupled revenue.
Then Meyers did something rare in Silicon Valley—he planned his own exit. He moved to Executive Chairman in 2024. And made room for fresh thinking.
2024-Present
Adaire Fox-Martin brings a different kind of talent to Equinix
She comes with experience from Oracle, SAP, and Google Cloud. During her storied career, she learned how enterprise software companies sell to big corporations. When she joined Equinix’s board in 2020, she was running Google Cloud’s worldwide sales.
She sees AI changing everything. Digital transformation isn’t a buzzword to her. It is remaking how companies think about infrastructure.
She’s also the first outsider to run Equinix since Adelson and Avery started it.
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