Case Study: Blade Group achieves sub-16ms gaming latency and scalable global expansion with Equinix

Blade Group - Customer Case Study

Blade is a Paris‑based startup that built Shadow, a cloud PC for gaming, and had grown to 5,000 customers with a 20,000‑strong waitlist while targeting 100,000+ users and international launches. The company needed to scale its infrastructure tenfold without degrading gaming performance — especially latency-sensitive input, encoding/decoding and distance‑related lag — and set a target of under 16 ms round‑trip latency.

Blade migrated its servers into Equinix’s PA1 facility and re‑architected for the digital edge using an interconnection‑first approach on Platform Equinix, installing 300 bays during a four‑month move and standardizing designs for global replication. The result: latency dropped below 16 ms, costs and performance were optimized, scalability and carrier access were greatly improved (including 400 Gbps transport and multi‑10 Gbps links in tests), and Blade is positioned to expand internationally and take advantage of future 5G gains.

Blade Group

Stéphane Héliot

Co-founder