Alberto Caraballo
Mexico’s hyperscale story is an inland story. Mexico City, Querétaro, and Monterrey hold the country’s compute capacity, and that is where most of the conversation about Mexico’s digital infrastructure takes place. Cancún rarely enters that conversation, and by compute footprint it does not need to. The hyperscale buildout is happening further inland.
But measure Cancún against a different question, where international traffic enters and leaves the country, and the picture changes. The city is becoming one of the most consequential locations in the Americas for connectivity. It is not a compute market. It is becoming a connectivity gateway. And in the next three to five years, our reading is that it will function as a second gateway for the Americas, alongside the one the industry has relied on for two decades.
What makes a gateway, and why Miami is the observable case
When the industry calls Miami the gateway of the Americas, that label is doing more work than it appears. It is not a comment on population, or on Florida’s economy, or on the size of the local data center market. It is a description of function. Miami is where international submarine cables converge, where carriers from across the hemisphere physically meet, and where the traffic of an entire region changes hands between the global internet and the domestic networks of the United States.
That role was not assigned. It was built over time by the accumulation of three things: subsea cables, an open ecosystem of carriers willing to interconnect in the same building, and a geographic position close enough to onward traffic corridors that landing there made sense for everyone involved. The NAP of the Americas, opened in 2001 and now operated as Equinix MI1, currently aggregates eighteen subsea cable systems under one roof, according to public reporting. Florida overall counts seventeen active landing sites with seven more under construction or planning.
Strip the marketing and that is what a gateway is. A converged location where cables, neutral interconnection, and geography reinforce one another until the system treats the place as default. The question worth asking is whether those conditions can emerge in a second location.
Our reading: Cancún is where they are emerging
Our view is that those conditions are already in motion, and that Cancún is the place in the western hemisphere where they are converging fastest. The next three to five years will not decide whether Cancún becomes a second gateway of the Americas. They will decide what operating model defines it. Each of the three components that built Miami’s role is now present in Cancún in some form. The story is not speculation. It is a question of pace.
The cables are already converging
Start with the material base. According to TeleGeography’s submarine cable database, four submarine cable systems are operational at Cancún today. AMX-1, in service since 2014. MAYA-1, in service since 2000. ARCOS-1, in service since 2001. GigNet-1, in service since 2021. Three more are committed and under construction or planning, all of them landing at Cancún within the next two to three years. MAYA-1.2, Liberty Networks’ replacement and upgrade of the legacy MAYA-1 ring, is in build. MANTA, the consortium system led by Liberty Networks, Gold Data, and Sparkle, is on track for ready-for-service in 2027. TAM-1, a private system filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and connecting Florida to Cancún, Puerto Barrios, and Puerto Cortés, adds a third planned landing.
That brings Cancún to seven operational or committed cable systems by the late 2020s. For comparison, the NAP of the Americas in Miami currently aggregates eighteen. The ratio is not yet parity. The direction matters more than the static count. The volume of new submarine capacity actively choosing Cancún as a landing point exceeds anything the city has seen since the first cables arrived more than two decades ago. The technical scale is also different. MANTA alone is engineered with up to eighteen fiber pairs and a design capacity of around twenty terabits per second per pair, comparable to the largest international cable systems being built anywhere in the region.
The infrastructure is showing up. The composition of what is showing up is what changes the argument.
Geography places Cancún at a natural convergence
Geography does the second part of the work. Cancún sits at the most accessible Atlantic-facing landfall on the Mexican coast, which makes it a natural terminus for three distinct traffic flows. Cables coming up from the Caribbean and Central America. Cables crossing from the U.S. east coast. Cables coming north from Colombia and the Atlantic side of South America. No other point in Mexico aggregates those three vectors with the same efficiency.
What completes the picture is what lies inland. Querétaro is consolidating as Mexico’s primary interconnection hub. The Mexican Data Center Association reports twenty-six data center projects currently in development in Querétaro, including hyperscale campuses by Microsoft and CloudHQ, with the state already concentrating around two-thirds of Mexico’s installed capacity. That concentration creates a natural pull for any international traffic entering Mexico, and the shortest, lowest-latency path from the country’s eastern subsea landings to Querétaro runs from Cancún. The pairing is not coincidental. A coastal gateway needs a domestic interconnection center to feed, and an interconnection center needs the cleanest possible international entry point. Cancún and Querétaro form that coupling. Each is more valuable because the other exists.
The system is asking for a second pole
The third condition is not in Cancún. It is in Miami, and in how the industry is responding to it.
Miami has carried the role of Latin America’s principal entry point for most of two decades. That has produced extraordinary density, and also extraordinary concentration. The metro sits in one of the hemisphere’s most active hurricane corridors, with documented disruptions to subsea cable systems traceable to physical events at Florida landing infrastructure. The NAP of the Americas itself has matured into a market where capacity expansion comes with the trade-offs typical of any saturated hub.
Critically, the industry is already responding. The defining feature of nearly every new submarine cable in the western hemisphere is the explicit pursuit of route diversity. MAYA-1.2 introduces a refreshed Caribbean ring that reduces reliance on aging segments. MANTA was conceived as the first international submarine cable to enter the Gulf of Mexico, designed to provide low-latency routes between Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and the United States that do not duplicate existing paths. As one recent example of the same pattern, MANTA’s selection of MDC’s Cable Landing Hubs at Cancún and Veracruz reflects how new systems are deliberately combining diversified routes with neutral landing models. The same pull is visible on the carrier side. Established Mexican operators have begun positioning route diversification toward the United States as an active commercial priority rather than a backlog item, with diversified paths already referenced as a deliverable in pre-sales conversations. Demand and supply are converging on the same answer from opposite directions.
This is not Miami in decline. Miami remains essential. A system that depends on a single primary entry point for an entire region inevitably builds a second pole. That second pole has to land somewhere. The cables are already telling us where.
What “second gateway” actually means
A second gateway is not a replacement. It is a completion.
The distinction worth holding onto is what each location actually does. Querétaro is a hub. A place where domestic networks concentrate, where compute aggregates, where the country’s interconnection density lives. Cancún is becoming something different. It is a gateway. The place where international traffic enters and exits the country before it ever reaches the hub. Our cross-border facilities along the U.S.–Mexico land border continue to do their own work, providing the terrestrial crossings that have served the region for two decades. Each plays a distinct role. None substitutes for another. Together, they form the architecture that the next phase of Latin American digital infrastructure will run on.
The next three to five years will not decide whether Cancún becomes a second gateway. The cables, the geography, and the industry’s own behavior have already settled that question. What the next three to five years will decide is the operating model that defines it. Open or proprietary. Neutral or closed. Single-cable or multi-cable. That is the question the cables are bringing ashore. It is the same question Miami answered in the early 2000s, and the answer shaped two decades of Latin American digital traffic. How Cancún answers it will shape the next two.
