Equinix Metal is a bare-metal-as-a-service offering that provisions dedicated physical hosts through an API, without a hypervisor sitting between the workload and the hardware. It began life as Packet, an API-first bare-metal startup that Equinix acquired in 2020 and rebranded the same year to slot the product into its global footprint of interconnection facilities.
Unlike a typical public cloud, every machine is single-tenant and unshared, which removes the noisy-neighbour and virtualisation overhead that makes bare-metal attractive for latency-sensitive or throughput-bound workloads. Networking is the other differentiator: hosts ship with BGP-ready uplinks, support for bringing your own IP space, and direct access to the Equinix Fabric, so a deployment can peer with carriers, clouds, and exchanges from points of presence in dozens of metros worldwide. Common use cases include high-performance and HPC-style workloads, Kubernetes control planes and storage clusters that want predictable hardware, edge and CDN footprints, anycast services, and networking labs that need real BGP rather than an overlay simulation.
In November 2024 Equinix announced that the public, self-serve Metal product would be wound down by 30 June 2026, with no new feature work and existing customers moved to month-to-month terms as their contracts expire. The Equinix Metal brand and the underlying interconnected bare-metal infrastructure remain part of the company’s portfolio, but the consumer-grade compute offering is on a clear sunset path, so any new project should weigh that timeline against alternatives.
