Enrique Ortegon
Mexico’s digital infrastructure conversation is conducted in megawatts. Capacity operating, capacity under construction, capacity announced. It is a reasonable way to track investment. It says nothing about whether traffic can be exchanged efficiently once that capacity is switched on.
There is a different number worth sitting with. Of the thousand most-visited websites in Mexico, 49% can be reached through a server or cache located inside the country. The average across the Americas is 69% (Internet Society Pulse, 2026).
That 20-point gap is not a capacity problem, and it is not an exchange problem either. It is a geography problem.
The build is not the constraint, and neither is the exchange layer
Take the capacity side first. Mexico has roughly 279 MW operating, 205 MW under construction and 1,730 MW announced (MEXDC, reported July 2026). Operating capacity roughly doubled in a single year, from 115.5 MW in 2024 to about 235 MW in 2025 (MEXDC, April 2026). Whatever else is true, the market is not short of construction.
Now the exchange side, which is more often assumed than measured. Mexico has seven active internet exchange points against an Americas average of six, and 40% of its 527 active networks can exchange traffic through one, counting both members and the customers of members (Internet Society Pulse, 2026). By count, Mexico sits above its regional average. The exchanges that exist are functioning and well subscribed.
So capacity is arriving quickly, exchanges are working, and content still sits outside the country more often than in comparable markets. The constraint has to be somewhere other than volume or capability.
Neutral ground sits in three cities, and the country is moving away from them
Here is the number that explains the gap. Internet exchange points are present in three of Mexico’s 74 population centers above 300,000 people (Internet Society Pulse, July 2026). Those three are Mexico City, Monterrey and Querétaro. All three are inland.
Demand is nothing like that concentrated. National internet use reached 86.1% of the population aged six and over in 2025, some 104.9 million people, but household penetration ranged from 90.5% in Mexico City and 89.9% in Nuevo León down to 68.3% in Veracruz, 64.0% in Oaxaca and 53.9% in Chiapas (INEGI, ENDUTIH 2025, published June 2026).
Content follows neutral ground, because that is the only rational place to put it. An operator deciding where to place a cache is choosing a location from which it can reach the largest number of networks in a single step. Where that condition exists, content moves closer to users. Where it does not, traffic travels to find a counterparty, and the round trip shows up as latency for everyone on the path.
None of this reflects a wrong decision by anyone. The three exchange locations are precisely where the Mexican market was concentrated when they were established: the capital, the industrial north, the central corridor. They were built for the country as it was. What has changed is that capacity and demand both started dispersing outward while the map of neutral ground stayed where it was.
Where neutral ground appears, an ecosystem forms around it
The encouraging part of this is that the mechanism is well established and fast when the conditions are right.
Monterrey is the domestic example. NIX Monterrey, the city’s first neutral exchange, operates from Pabellón M and brings together more than thirty national and international operators. DE-CIX, one of the largest exchange operators in the world, established access points in Mexico City and Querétaro, extending a proven interconnection model into the market rather than waiting for one to emerge.
Internationally the pattern repeats. In Marseille, a carrier-neutral facility opened in 2014 and an exchange was established inside it in 2015. Within three years the first building had gone from 46 networks to 134, and by 2020 the campus hosted more than 150 network service providers. In Fortaleza, submarine cables had been landing since 2000, but the city entered the global top thirty for peering capacity at public internet exchanges only after a coordinated national approach to traffic exchange took hold (LACNIC, 2026).
In every case the sequence runs the same direction. Neutral ground comes first. The ecosystem assembles around it. It does not happen the other way, and it does not happen on its own.
What to watch
The industry has started asking the right question. Discussion at this year’s Mexico Connect turns on developers looking beyond established locations to unlock capacity nationwide, and on the observation that network performance depends not only on how much fiber gets deployed but on how efficiently traffic is exchanged.
On current trajectory Mexico will not run short of megawatts. The open question is narrower and more interesting than the headline numbers suggest: whether the map of neutral ground grows to match the map of capacity, or stays three cities wide while everything else spreads out around it.
