"Cloud rival Google"
LOL. I think you mean Amazon. Google are hardly a rival to Azure. Pretty much no one uses Google for cloud.
Microsoft and Equinix have interlaced their fleet of data centers to let customers go directly to the Azure cloud from inside 16 co-location data centers around the world. The expansion to 'Azure ExpressRoute' was announced by Microsoft on Tuesday and means security-conscious organizations hosting with Equinix can safely …
Someone's realised that locating datacentres serving EMEA is not best achieved by locating them on the far left of the map and where connectivity is constrained. The tax planners probably thought it made sense. Equinix may have '900' providers, but the subset of those with any decent capacity into Ireland is somewhat smaller I'd suggest.