colocation
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The Company That Rents the Internet Its Roads - and Just Bought the Traffic Back
Uniti spent a decade as the landlord of a fiber empire. In 2025 it bought its biggest tenant back, and set out to sell strands of glass to the companies building the AI internet.
Iron Mountain
It began as a Cold War bunker for filing cabinets. Seventy-four years later, the same company that guards your grandmother's insurance records is quietly building the warehouses where AI lives.
Digital Realty
The company you have probably never heard of owns the buildings your favorite apps actually live in. Here is how a REIT born from bankruptcy auctions became the landlord of the AI boom.
Lime Trading
Lime Trading (Lime Trading Corp., operating as Lime Financial) is a New York-based broker-dealer that gives independent and institutional traders access to institutional-grade trading technology. Born in 2000 inside a quantitative hedge fund as Lime Brokerage, the firm built low-latency infrastructure for high-frequency trading and now offers direct market access, trading APIs, colocation, and proprietary web and mobile platforms for trading U.S. equities, options, and futures. It positions itself in the gap between bulge-bracket banks and retail apps, serving sophisticated traders and developers who want speed, transparency, and quality execution.
Equinix
Equinix is a global digital infrastructure company that designs, builds and operates carrier-neutral colocation data centers - its International Business Exchange (IBX) centers - where enterprises, cloud providers, networks and financial institutions place equipment and interconnect directly with one another. Founded in 1998 on the principle of neutrality, Equinix has grown into the world's largest data center and interconnection platform, operating a programmable network of more than 270 data centers across roughly 75+ markets in 30+ countries. Structured as a real estate investment trust (REIT) since 2015, the company pairs physical colocation with software-defined services such as Equinix Fabric, Metal and Network Edge, positioning itself as the meeting place for hybrid multicloud and, increasingly, distributed AI workloads.
Evocative
Evocative is a Los Angeles-based digital infrastructure provider that delivers enterprise-grade colocation, bare metal servers, carrier-neutral network, and managed services. Built largely through acquisition, its footprint spans roughly 20 data centers and dozens of Points of Presence across strategically located North American, European, and Asian metros. Evocative positions itself as a carrier-neutral, edge-ready alternative to the largest colocation operators, giving enterprises and service providers full control over performance, connectivity, and scaling for workloads that increasingly include AI.
Sonic
Sonic is the largest independently owned internet service provider in California, founded in 1994 in Santa Rosa. It builds and runs its own fiber-optic network, selling fast, flat-priced gigabit and 10-gigabit home and business internet with no contracts, no data caps, and a privacy stance that has earned it a perfect score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After more than 30 years serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic began its first out-of-region expansion in 2026, lighting up fiber in Los Angeles and Dallas.
Zayo Group
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.
Derek Garnier
Derek Garnier is the CEO of Evocative, a global digital infrastructure provider headquartered in Los Angeles, California. With over 35 years in the industry, he has built, operated, and sold multiple companies across data centers, fiber networks, and managed services. A former engineer turned strategist, Garnier co-founded Arcadian Infracom, led Layer42 Networks through a successful acquisition by Wave Broadband in 2015, and returned to Evocative as CEO in February 2023. He champions hybrid cloud, AI-ready infrastructure, and inclusion as core business pillars, guiding Evocative through a significant debt financing round in December 2025 to expand high-density colocation and network capacity for next-generation AI applications.
Adaire Fox-Martin
Adaire Fox-Martin is CEO and President of Equinix, the world's largest data-center company. A Trinity College Dublin graduate who once taught school in Ireland, she spent 18 years at Oracle, 14 at SAP, and three at Google Cloud before taking the top job at Equinix in 2024. She runs 280 data centers across 77 markets and calls the internet 'the fourth utility'.