Oman is to get a new carrier-neutral internet exchange. Ooredoo Oman and DE-CIX signed an agreement on 3 November 2026, at the GCC Middle East 2026 and SIS summit in Muscat, to launch Gulf Gateway-IX, which is due to go live in early 2027.
The exchange will join Muscat and Salalah as a single national fabric. A network operator, enterprise or content provider that peers in one city will be able to exchange traffic with peers in the other through a single port and one peering policy. Muscat is the northern landing point for subsea cables from the GCC and Asia, while Salalah in the south connects to East Africa, Europe and India.
The case made to operators is resilience and cost. The two companies say networks across the Gulf, Asia and East Africa will be able to route around subsea disruptions, including Red Sea chokepoints, without sending traffic through Europe. They also say enterprises, free zones and public sector bodies outside the capital area will get the same low-latency access to hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and to content delivery networks, as organisations in Muscat.
The exchange will be housed in Ooredoo's data centres in Barka and Salalah, about 1,000 kilometres apart and directly interconnected. It will also be reachable through Equinix's MC1 facility in Muscat and SN1 in Salalah, and will connect to national, regional and international exchanges. DE-CIX will run the technical operations through its DE-CIX as a Service programme.
Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX, said: "Gulf Gateway-IX powered by DE-CIX establishes a resilient interconnection platform in Oman at one of the most strategically important infrastructure locations on the Arabian Peninsula." Saoud Al Riyami, CEO of Ooredoo Oman, linked the project to Oman Vision 2040 and to demand for AI, cloud and industrial automation workloads.
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