DE-CIX upgrades New York metro network across Hudson
Tue, 5th May 2026 (Today)
DE-CIX has completed a major upgrade to its New York metro platform, expanding its network architecture across New York and New Jersey.
The overhaul strengthens its position in the New York metropolitan interconnection market, where it supports more than 260 connected networks.
The upgrade centres on a quad-node design, with two core nodes in New York and two in New Jersey. The layout is intended to improve redundancy and support A/B connectivity strategies across the Hudson River for customers seeking geographically separated connections.
The revised architecture reflects New Jersey's growing role in the wider digital infrastructure of the New York metro area. Customers including enterprises, carriers, cloud providers and AI-focused platforms are seeking tighter integration between sites on both sides of the river while maintaining separation for continuity planning.
DE-CIX said its presence in the market has grown over more than a decade. It described DE-CIX New York as the largest internet exchange in the New York metro area and the north-east region, and the third largest in North America.
Its regional footprint has also widened. When DE-CIX entered the New York market, internet exchanges served 20 data centre facilities across the metro area. That figure has now roughly doubled through broader integration of sites, including locations on Long Island, in Brooklyn and at six facilities in New Jersey.
Capacity shift
Another part of the upgrade is designed to handle rising demand for 400 Gigabit Ethernet, or 400 GE, ports. Traffic patterns are changing as AI-related computing, cloud connectivity and content distribution require higher-throughput, lower-latency interconnection.
DE-CIX has also introduced ROADM-based smart switching technology into the metro network. This allows network paths to be changed through software, so traffic can be added, dropped or redirected without engineers having to intervene physically at a site.
In the New York market, where outages can have broad commercial consequences, the ability to reconfigure routes remotely could reduce provisioning times and improve recovery options. The market serves financial services groups, media companies, cloud operators and a growing number of AI-related businesses.
DE-CIX also highlighted the role of its GlobePEER service in linking New York participants to Frankfurt and other overseas markets through remote peering. This gives networks connected in New York a way to exchange traffic with international partners without establishing a physical presence in those locations.
Market position
The New York interconnection market remains one of the most established and competitive in North America. Operators are under pressure to keep expanding capacity and resilience as workloads become more distributed and customers seek greater control over where traffic flows.
Recent investments are intended to support long-term resilience rather than short-term traffic spikes. DE-CIX's broader North American footprint includes exchanges in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York, Phoenix and Richmond, a cloud exchange in Seattle, and a distributed exchange in Mexico.
Ed d'Agostino outlined the rationale for the latest changes. "The New York metro is a market where customers expect infrastructure that simply works, no matter what's happening around it," said Ed d'Agostino, Vice President, DE-CIX North America.
"Our upgrades are about building and reinforcing that reliability at scale. With our 4-node architecture spanning New York and New Jersey, and readiness for higher-capacity services, we're building for how networks are actually evolving - more distributed, more performance-driven, and with greater degrees of visibility and control than ever before," d'Agostino said.
Beyond the network upgrade, DE-CIX said it has continued to support the local interconnection community through the rebooted NYog operator group. It has also worked with research and education organisations including NJEdge, OCEAN, NYSERNet, Connecticut Education Networks, Rutgers University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Williams College and the University of Vermont on the adoption of peering models.
Those efforts sit alongside its involvement in the Global Interconnection Academy and related digital infrastructure education initiatives.