Funke Opeke, director at MDXi.

Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), one of the largest internet exchange operators in the world, and MDXi have launched a new internet exchange in Lagos, Nigeria.

The new internet exchange, AMS-IX Lagos, is situated in the carrier-neutral data centre of MDXi, an Equinix company.

MDXi is a West African data centre company. Its carrier neutral data centres have a combined capacity of 5 MW across the key markets of Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

Under the terms of the partnership, MDXi will serve as the commercial partner of AMS-IX and the regional sales and marketing arm for AMS-IX Lagos. AMS-IX will run the technical and operational management of the exchange.

AMS-IX Lagos aims to become a content hub for West Africa, enabling regional and local ISPs, carriers, and internet exchanges to aggregate content from large global content delivery networks, hosting companies and application providers.

In the coming months, MDXi and AMS-IX will focus on seeking alliances with local telecom operators, other internet exchanges and supporting local ecosystems.

AMS-IX Lagos will launch with over 25 connected networks as AMS-IX and MDXi migrate and onboard the existing connected networks of West Africa Internet Exchange (WAF-IX) in the coming month.

Connected networks at WAF-IX include large content delivery networks and application providers, such as Cloudflare, Microsoft and Google.

Peter van Burgel, CEO of AMS-IX says: “We intend to add value to the local carriers and internet exchanges by attracting even more content players to the region and support the local connectivity community. This is a very exciting project for us as we see it as an important steppingstone for bringing low-latency, affordable internet available to the West-African region.”

For Funke Opeke, director, MDXi, this partnership enables MDXi to “deliver value to the rich ecosystem of network operators, carriers, content providers, cloud services providers, and enterprises that we have present in the data centre.”

Opeke adds: “The AMS-IX partnership will help MDXi consolidate its role as a content hub, not just for Nigeria, but for Francophone and English-speaking West and Central Africa.”