Equinix announced a 20-plus-percent increase in revenue for 2012, as well as the launch of two new US data centers and construction of another one in Toronto on Wednesday.

The company said it had opened Phase I of its DC11 data center in Washington, D.C., and Phase I of an SE3 data center in Seattle, in January. It has also started construction of a TR2 data center in Toronto.

Equinix reported revenue of US$1.89bn for 2012 - up 21% year over year. Most of this figure (95%) represented recurring revenue.

The provider’s net income for the year was $144.7m - up 54% from net income it reported for 2011. Full-year earnings per share were $2.67 - up 57% year over year.

Equinix CEO Steve Smith said the year was a milestone one for the company, which delivered $506.5m in revenue for the fourth quarter alone, entered new geographic markets and expanded inventory in existing markets. “With our entry into Mainland China, Jakarta and Dubai, as well as our continued investment in existing markets, we now have over 7m of gross square feet of capacity, making us the largest retail colocation provider in the world,” he said.

The company initially entered Mainland China in 2010 by partnering with a local system integrator Shanghai Data Solutions, which had a data center in Shanghai. Equinix now has five data centers in Shanghai, planning to launch Phase II of the fifth one (SH5) next month.

Equinix bought its first data center in Dubai in November 2012 and partnered with an Indonesian provider to get a foothold in Jakarta in October.

The company is also continuing an aggressive expansion program in Europe. It is planning to launch Phase I of its fifth Zurich data center in the second quarter and Phase II of its fifth Frankfurt facility in Q3.

The company invested $334m in real estate and acquisitions over the course of the year. The acquisitions included Hong Kong-based provider Asia Tone in May and German provider ancotel in July.

On Wednesday’s 2012 earnings call with analysts, Smith pointed out a pickup in sales to customers setting up hybrid-cloud infrastructure. The advent of hybrid cloud is a boon for companies like Equinix, whose model is to provide colocation space but also to focus heavily on interconnection.

Such a hybrid-cloud infrastructure usually consists of a private cloud set up in a colocation cage at an Equinix data center and connected to a public-cloud provider’s infrastructure hosted at the same facility.

Examples of major customers that chose to use Equinix for this purpose in 2012 were Badgeville and Box. Badgeville provides an analytics platform for monitoring and measuring user behavior online as a service. Box is a popular cloud-based storage and collaboration platform.

Equinix is continuing to go through the process of conversion into a real estate investment trust (REIT), which it started in September 2012.