DE-CIX Expands Global AI-Ready Connectivity with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro

Dual-homed architecture across North America, Europe, and Asia delivers highly resilient, georedundant Microsoft Azure connectivity for latency-sensitive enterprise and AI workloads.

DE-CIX, a leading global operator of Internet, Cloud and AI Exchanges, today announced the implementation of georedundant connectivity to Microsoft Azure in cities spanning three continents – North America, Europe, and Asia.  Azure ExpressRoute Metro connectivity solution involves dual-homed connections to two distinct ExpressRoute locations within the same city, offering very high availability for sensitive AI workloads and critical resources in Microsoft Azure. The highly resilient architecture is now available at DE-CIX’s carrier and data-center neutral Cloud and AI Exchanges in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Singapore, with more locations to follow. In total, DE-CIX now operates 29 on-ramps to Azure in 24 cities worldwide, with remote access available from all exchange locations using its global backbone.

“The physical separation of network interconnects – as deployed in the Azure ExpressRoute Metro solution implemented by DE-CIX – is a best practice for resilient operations and a hallmark of DE-CIX’s architecture globally,” says Dr. Christoph Dietzel, Head of Products and Research at DE-CIX. “DE-CIX’s distributed, carrier and datacenter neutral exchanges enable local and remote access to all the major cloud players. This secures critical enterprise processes and workloads and allows companies to build the most robust cloud connectivity architecture – integrating a multi-cloud approach and including remote cloud regions for back-up and resiliency purposes. DE-CIX’s platform provides the ideal basis for harnessing and harmonizing all cloud and AI activities and simplifying connectivity.”

Azure ExpressRoute Metro enables private, dedicated connectivity between enterprise infrastructure and Azure, helping organizations build more resilient and stable cloud environments. With ExpressRoute Metro, customers can establish dual-homed connectivity across separate Azure peering locations within the same metropolitan area, supporting high availability for latency-sensitive enterprise applications and AI workloads.

“We are pleased to work with DE-CIX to further extend access to Microsoft Azure,” said Sudha Mahajan, Partner, Azure Cloud & AI, at Microsoft. “Connecting directly to Azure ExpressRoute Metro on the DE-CIX platform provides a low latency path to the Microsoft network. The ExpressRoute Metro architecture ensures redundant and resilient connectivity to support critical workloads.”

DE-CIX’s distributed Cloud and AI Exchanges enable secure cloud connectivity and cloud to cloud routing for seamless and resilient management of critical cloud-related dataflows, including hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios. Direct and dedicated private access is possible to all the major global hyperscalers, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. Globally, DE-CIX maintains a total of close to a terabit of bandwidth to major hyperscalers and 160+ cloud onramps, with new cloud partners being connected to the exchanges at regular intervals.