As part of its stated aim to help organisations build more resilient and stable cloud environments, internet, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) exchange operator DE-CIX has announced the implementation of geo-redundant connectivity to Microsoft Azure in cities spanning North America, Europe and Asia.
Founded in 1995, DE-CIX offers interconnection services in 60 locations in EMEA, North and South America, and Asia. Accessible from datacentres in more than 600 cities worldwide, it connects network operators (carriers), internet service providers (ISPs), content providers and enterprise networks from more than 100 countries; and offers peering, cloud and other interconnection services.
Azure ExpressRoute Metro is designed to enable private, dedicated connectivity between enterprise infrastructure and the Azure cloud platform. The connectivity solution involves dual-homed connectivity across separate Azure peering locations in the same metropolitan area. This resulted in “very high” availability for latency-sensitive enterprise applications and “sensitive” AI workloads and critical resources in Microsoft Azure.
The resilient architecture is now available at DE-CIX’s carrier and datacentre neutral cloud and AI exchanges in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam and Singapore. DE-CIX added that there are more locations to follow and that it now operates 29 on-ramps to Azure in 24 cities worldwide, with remote access available from all exchange locations using its global backbone.
“The physical separation of network interconnects – as deployed in the Azure ExpressRoute Metro solution implemented by DE-CIX – is a best practice for resilient operations and a hallmark of DE-CIX’s architecture globally,” said Christoph Dietzel, head of products and research at DE-CIX.
“DE-CIX’s distributed, carrier and datacentre neutral exchanges enable local and remote access to all the major cloud players. This secures critical enterprise processes and workloads and allows companies to build the most robust cloud connectivity architecture – integrating a multicloud approach and including remote cloud regions for back-up and resiliency purposes. DE-CIX’s platform provides the ideal basis for harnessing and harmonising all cloud and AI activities and simplifying connectivity.”
Sudha Mahajan, partner of Azure Cloud & AI at Microsoft, added: “We are pleased to work with DE-CIX to further extend access to Microsoft Azure. Connecting directly to Azure ExpressRoute Metro on the DE-CIX platform provides a low latency path to the Microsoft network. The ExpressRoute Metro architecture ensures redundant and resilient connectivity to support critical workloads.”
Globally, DE-CIX maintains a total of close to a terabit of bandwidth to the major hyper-scalers and more than 160 cloud onramps. In general, the company’s distributed cloud and AI exchanges are designed to enable secure cloud connectivity and cloud-to-cloud routing for management of critical cloud-related dataflows, including hybrid and multicloud scenarios.
Direct and dedicated private access is possible to all the major global hyper-scalers. As well as Microsoft Azure, supported platforms include AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud.
In May 2026, DE-CIX completed a major upgrade to its New York metro platform to a quad-node network architecture, with two core nodes in New York City and two in New Jersey. The rationale given for the move was that as traffic patterns evolve and AI workloads demand more distributed infrastructure, making it necessary to boost the third largest Internet Exchange on the American continent.
