Thirty years after founding the Frankfurt internet exchange, DE-CIX is processing 48 exabytes of traffic a year and deploying 800-gigabit ports that barely existed on the product roadmap when it launched its Annual Report this morning.
The numbers in DE-CIX's 2025 Annual Report describe what happens to a neutral interconnection network when cloud and AI workloads grow faster than planned capacity: you get 4,300 connected networks (+25%), 220 terabits of total capacity (+40%), and a revenue line that nudged to €70.9 million — up €2.3 million on 2024.
Traffic peaks across DE-CIX's exchange portfolio tracked that growth. Frankfurt hit 18.73 terabits per second, crossing the 18 Tbit/s threshold for the first time. Mumbai climbed 63% to 2.76 Tbit/s. The UAE-IX in Dubai broke 1 Tbit/s for the first time, up 35%. Chicago's peak jumped 200% to 672 Gbit/s, the standout surge in a year of broad network gains.
Beyond the headline figures, two moves signal where DE-CIX is positioning itself. First, it deployed the world's first 800 GE customer port at Frankfurt while expanding 400 GE ports by 120% globally — the high-density port rollout that AI-driven workloads require. Second, it opened ten new exchanges in 2025 across Brazil, Mexico, Qatar, and the US, pushing its geographic footprint up 10% as it presses into markets where latency to major cloud nodes is still high.
We started building for terabit-scale, real-time AI traffic before most networks were asking for it, and that's reflected in where we stand today
The company is transitioning toward what it calls Interconnection as a Service: API-enabled provisioning, self-service capabilities, and programmable peering. Frankfurt now handles over 48 exabytes of data per year across nearly 1,100 connected networks — figures that put it among the largest exchanges in the world by volume.
