MDC Newsroom
Juan Salazar, CEO & Founder of MDC Data Centers, interviewed by datacenterHawk at International Telecoms Week (ITW) 2026.
At ITW 2026 in Washington, D.C., datacenterHawk’s Steve Sasse sat down with Juan Salazar, CEO and Founder of MDC Data Centers, to discuss cross-border interconnection, the capacity gap in Latin America, and MDC’s move into submarine cable infrastructure on Mexico’s coasts.
The conversation covers the six carrier-neutral border sites MDC operates today, why Northern Mexico is emerging as a data center overflow market, and how the Manta submarine cable consortium — landing in Cancún and Veracruz in summer 2027 — could change the connectivity map for the entire region.
📺 Watch the full interview on YouTube: Data Center Growth Shifts South
Key Takeaways
- MDC operates 6 carrier-neutral border sites (McAllen, Eagle Pass, Laredo, El Paso, Nogales, San Diego) with 2 more in development, each combining colocation, International Fiber Crossings, and ecosystem density in a single facility.
- Cross-border data traffic between the U.S. and Mexico is growing 30% year over year — and U.S. capacity constraints are accelerating demand for data center infrastructure in Northern Mexico.
- Latin America accounts for only ~2.5% of 87GW of global commissioned data center capacity — a gap pointing to significant growth ahead.
- MDC is building two Cable Landing Hubs in Cancún and Veracruz for the Manta submarine cable consortium (Liberty Networks, Gold Data, Sparkle), delivering summer 2027.
- Salazar argues Cancún could challenge Miami as Latin America’s interconnection hub — offering better geography, lower latency, and reduced concentration risk.
Interview Transcript
Building an Ecosystem, Not Just a Building
Steve Sasse, datacenterHawk:
MDC has a distinct model compared to most colocation operators. How do you describe what you do?
Juan Salazar, MDC Data Centers:
We’re not selling data center space — we’re orchestrating interconnection. When you focus purely on filling a building, you get a building. When you focus on who connects to whom, and how efficiently that happens, you get an ecosystem. The value is in the density. At our McAllen facility, we have the largest concentration of Mexican network providers of any single data center on the U.S. side of the border. Carriers come because other carriers are already there. It becomes self-reinforcing.
We’ve replicated that across six sites — McAllen, Eagle Pass, Laredo, El Paso, Nogales, and San Diego — with two more in development. Each one follows the same logic: carrier-neutral colocation, International Fiber Crossings in-house, and the conditions for networks to converge. Neutrality is non-negotiable. The moment you favor one carrier over another, you undermine the whole model.
“When you focus on who connects to whom, and how efficiently that happens, you end up with an ecosystem — not just a building.” — Juan Salazar, CEO, MDC Data Centers
From Monopoly to One-Stop Shop
Sasse:
Fiber crossings at the U.S.–Mexico border used to be a complicated, monopoly-controlled process. What did MDC change?
Salazar:
Historically, crossing fiber across the border meant dealing with a handful of entities that controlled the physical infrastructure and had significant leverage — opaque pricing, unpredictable timelines, multiple vendors. It was a real barrier.
We brought that function in-house. Instead of a carrier negotiating a separate conduit agreement, navigating permitting, and waiting months, they now come to us and get colocation, interconnection, and the physical border crossing in one place. When you lower friction, more networks participate. When more networks participate, the ecosystem gets richer. We went from regional player to primary interconnection point in several of our markets because of that simplification.
The Border as a Market — Not Just a Crossing
Sasse:
Meta picked MDC’s El Paso facility for a workshop. What does that signal?
Salazar:
El Paso plus Ciudad Juárez is roughly three million people in a single metro area. That’s not a regional market — that’s a major population center with digital demand on both sides of the line simultaneously. Meta recognized that. For us, it confirmed what we’ve believed for years: the border isn’t just a place where traffic crosses. It’s a market in its own right, and it needs infrastructure built for it specifically.
That dynamic is expanding. U.S. border communities are seeing real capacity pressure — power constraints, permitting friction, community opposition in established markets like Northern Virginia and Phoenix. That’s pushing demand south. Northern Mexico has land, lower costs, and energy infrastructure being built out by the nearshoring manufacturing boom. It’s a credible overflow market, and we’re already seeing it in our pipeline.
“The border isn’t just a place where traffic crosses. It’s a market in its own right.” — Juan Salazar
LATAM’s Capacity Gap — and What’s Changing
Sasse:
You often cite LATAM’s share of global capacity. Give us that context.
Salazar:
The global data center market sits at approximately 87GW of commissioned capacity. Latin America — Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, all of it — accounts for roughly 2.5% of that, for a region of over 650 million people with a fast-growing digital economy. The gap between demand and available infrastructure is real and widening.
Part of the reason is historical: when Latin American traffic was destined for U.S.-hosted platforms, routing north made sense. Miami became the de facto regional hub not because of geography, but because the infrastructure was there. It worked — but it was never optimal. Every packet from Bogotá or Lima that routes up to Miami and back is carrying latency it doesn’t need, and that single point of concentration is a resilience risk the region has never fully addressed.
MDC’s Coastal Move: The Manta Cable Landing Hubs
Sasse:
MDC is now moving beyond the border into submarine cable infrastructure. Walk us through the Manta project.
Salazar:
The Manta consortium — Liberty Networks, Gold Data, and Sparkle — selected MDC to develop two Cable Landing Hubs in Mexico: Cancún and Veracruz. These are combined cable landing station and data center facilities, designed to operate as neutral interconnection points on the coast — same philosophy as our border sites, applied to a different geography.
Each facility is modular, scalable to 5MW through 1MW increments. Delivery is summer 2027. For MDC, this is a deliberate extension of the border model. If the goal is to make Mexico a real interconnection platform, you need infrastructure on the coasts, not just the land border. Submarine cables are the backbone of international connectivity — and we want to be where they land.
“If the goal is to make Mexico a real interconnection platform, you need infrastructure on the coasts, not just the land border.” — Juan Salazar
Could Cancún Challenge Miami as LATAM’s Hub?
Sasse:
You’ve made an argument that Cancún could become a genuine regional interconnection hub. Make that case.
Salazar:
Miami works because the infrastructure is there. But it’s in Florida — it’s not geographically central to Latin America. Traffic routing from São Paulo to Mexico City often touches Miami along the way. That’s unnecessary latency, cost, and concentration risk.
Cancún is actually in Latin America, at the edge of the Caribbean, with routing options toward Central America, the Gulf, and the eastern U.S. If you land multiple submarine cables there and build neutral interconnection infrastructure — which is exactly what we’re doing with Manta — you create the conditions for a hub that competes on geography and latency, not just legacy investment. I’m not saying Miami loses its role overnight. But the case for routing everything through a single U.S. city gets weaker as regional infrastructure matures. Cancún is a credible alternative.
Will Latin America Produce AI or Just Consume It?
Sasse:
Last question: AI. Will Latin America be a participant or just a consumer?
Salazar:
That’s the defining question for the region’s digital future. Right now, the AI value chain — training, inference, the models — is concentrated in the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia. Latin America is going to consume AI at scale. The question is whether it builds the infrastructure to run workloads locally, or whether the economic value of AI continues to accrue elsewhere.
The infrastructure conversation and the AI conversation are inseparable. You can’t run inference at scale without data center capacity. You can’t compete for AI workloads without low-latency connectivity. What we’re building — at the border, in Cancún, in Veracruz — is part of the foundation that would allow the region to participate as more than a consumer. The demand is there. The investment is coming. The question is whether it arrives fast enough, and in the right places.
Conclusion
Thank you to datacenterHawk and Steve Sasse for hosting this conversation at ITW 2026. Juan Salazar’s perspective cuts through the noise around Latin America and Mexico infrastructure opportunity — grounded in the specific mechanics of how cross-border connectivity actually works, and what it takes to build an ecosystem rather than just a facility.
Watch the complete interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLi22DzKG4
