DE-CIX, which operates 60 internet exchange locations across Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia, announced today that it has implemented Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro connectivity at five of its Cloud and AI Exchanges. The architecture is dual-homed: each site connects to two distinct ExpressRoute locations within the same metropolitan area, so a single-path failure does not bring down the Azure connection.
The announcement pushes DE-CIX's total Azure on-ramps to 29, across 24 cities worldwide. Remote access via DE-CIX's global backbone extends Azure connectivity beyond those 24 cities to any of its 600-plus data centre locations globally. The initial five live sites — New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Singapore — cover the main enterprise and AI workload regions across North America, Europe, and Asia.
ExpressRoute Metro, Microsoft's private dedicated connectivity product for Azure, is designed for latency-sensitive applications. The dual-homed variant adds a redundancy layer on top: two physically separate connections to Azure from the same city, rather than a single path with a remote failover. For organisations running AI inference, real-time analytics, or other workloads where a connection drop has immediate operational consequence, the architecture reduces the recovery window significantly.
DE-CIX's platform already carries direct and dedicated private access to AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud alongside Azure, with close to a terabit of bandwidth to major hyperscalers across its exchange portfolio. The georedundant Azure connectivity adds a resilience tier to that multi-cloud routing capability.
Sudha Mahajan, partner for Azure Cloud and AI at Microsoft, said the DE-CIX partnership extends Azure ExpressRoute Metro's reach and provides a low-latency path to the Microsoft network for organisations connecting through DE-CIX's exchange infrastructure.
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