DE-CIX reports 10% increase in global network connections

Author: Simon Rowley

Internet Exchange (IX) operator, DE-CIX, has today released its results from the financial year 2024, demonstrating double-figure growth in networks, data traffic, and capacity.

The company finished the year with more than 4,000 networks connected worldwide, up 10% on the previous year, and 170 terabits connected customer capacity, which is a growth of 20%. Global peak traffic from peering – the direct interconnection of networks – finished the year just below 25 Tbit/s, up 11% from 2023. Global revenues grew by 8.3% to €68.6 million (£58.1m). Having added a further five IX locations during 2024, and announcing its market entry to Brazil, DE-CIX is today present in 60 markets on five continents.

The company operates several of the world’s most important IXs, including DE-CIX Frankfurt, the largest IX in Europe, DE-CIX New York, the largest in the Northeast of the US, DE-CIX Mumbai, the largest in India, and the UAE-IX powered by DE-CIX, the largest in the Middle East. With its connected networks and its geographical coverage, DE-CIX is unsurpassed worldwide in the provision of peering services via IXs – whether wholesale network peering, cloud peering, or application network peering.

Peering is used by network operators to optimise data pathways and enhance the performance and security of the digital content, services, and applications that make up the Internet. As well as catering to the long-standing wholesale network operator customer group, DE-CIX also provides enterprise-grade peering and interconnection services to global corporations and Fortune 500 companies. As such, the operator has a decisive influence on the global traffic flows that power the Internet, digital economies, and digital life.

Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX, comments, “In our 30th anniversary year, the time has come for a new style of peering to meet the needs of the new Internet. Peering – direct network interconnection over an IX – will be central to creating AI-ready infrastructure for all future use-cases.

“Alongside Internet Exchanges creating network density in major aggregation points, AI Exchanges will be needed at the Deep Edge to support the development of multi-AI inference functionality in the next generation of products and services. Therefore, we will see a layered approach to infrastructure, integrating the hyper-local, the regional, the pan-regional, and the global. At DE-CIX, we are working towards the realisation of this vision to meet the needs of tomorrow – ready for the next 30 years of innovation and peering excellence.”

On 26 June 2025, DE-CIX will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its first Internet Exchange (IX) in Frankfurt, Germany – a milestone not only in the company’s history, but also in the development of the global Internet. Exactly 30 years to the day since its foundation, the celebration will take place in Frankfurt with the DE-CIX Global Interconnection Summit. Among the highlights will be the publication of a new study delving into existing and emerging Digital Capitals, of which Frankfurt is a leading example globally.

The full DE-CIX Annual Report 2024 can be downloaded by clicking here.

For more from DE-CIX, click here.