Before he built the buildings that now carry a large share of the internet, Jay Adelson worked his way in through a temp agency. A podcast page for his 2019 Something Ventured interview marks that as the start of his path. It fits a career that had no straight line. Adelson grew up in Southfield, Michigan, studied film and broadcasting at Boston University with some computer science alongside, and began working in post-production sound.
In 1993 he moved to San Francisco and went into internet plumbing. He joined the early ISP Netcom as an installation coordinator and rose to director of network operations. He was running Netcom's network in 1995, when the hacker Kevin Mitnick was caught. By late 1996 he was at Digital Equipment Corporation, building and running the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, or PAIX. The idea was simple: carriers needed a neutral building where they could hand traffic to each other.
Adelson saw that it could be copied. Every big city could have a telecom hotel. With Al Avery, another Digital facilities manager, he left in June 1998 and founded Equinix. Early on the company was reportedly called Quark Communications. He was the first chief technology officer, overseeing how the buildings were designed and built. Looking back on the early years in 2013, he said only that "it was a crazy time".
The timing was unkind. Equinix listed in August 2000, just as telecom customers began to fail. How it got through is not well documented, but what followed is: in 2002 it merged with I-STT, a subsidiary of Singapore Technologies Telemedia, and with Pihana Pacific, which gave it a base in Asia-Pacific. Europe came with the 2007 purchase of IXEurope. When Steve Smith left Hewlett-Packard to run Equinix that year, it had roughly $400 million of annual revenue and a market value of about $6 billion.
Adelson did not stay to see it. He stepped back to a strategic advisor role in 2005, ran Digg from February 2005 and left in April 2010 after disagreements with Kevin Rose and the board. Later he started a venture firm, Center Electric, named after a company his great-grandfather founded in Detroit in the 1940s.
Equinix opened its 50th data centre in London in 2010, bought Switch and Data, and became a real estate investment trust in 2015. In 2016 it closed the roughly $3.8 billion TelecityGroup deal. In 2025 it reported $9.22 billion in revenue, and on 6 November 2026 its market value was around $99 billion.
Adelson did not invent a new technology. He copied something that had worked once, in one building, and asked why it should not work everywhere.