Joel Pacheco Gonçalves
Mexico has never built long-haul fiber faster than it is building it now. One road still isn’t there, and it’s the one that runs through the middle.
Seventy kilometers, and no way south
In Doña Ana County, New Mexico, Oracle is building Project Jupiter, an AI campus for OpenAI. Four thousand construction jobs, fifteen hundred permanent ones, four hundred and ten million dollars committed to the county for schools, water and infrastructure. It sits about seventy kilometers from the international crossing at El Paso.
Now imagine an operator at that scale deciding to put a compute node in Querétaro. A perfectly ordinary decision. Querétaro holds most of Mexico’s installed capacity and is where the customers are.
Go looking for the fiber that gets them there, and there is nothing to buy. Not congested. Not expensive. Absent. No modern, underground, high-count route runs from Ciudad Juárez down through the center of the country. So the build swings east through Texas or west through Arizona to find a way in, adding a thousand kilometers of glass and years of construction to reach a city that sits almost due south.
This is not a routing problem. Traffic can always find a path. This is a construction problem, and it is the layer nobody can work around.
Two weeks, two truths
I spent two weeks this month between Mexico Connect in Mexico City and DataCloud in Austin, and I came back holding two facts that refuse to sit together.
In Austin, session after session landed on the same finding: fiber is becoming the binding constraint on data center development. Power still stops projects, and in plenty of markets it stops them first. But glass has moved up the list fast, and in some places it is now the thing that decides whether a site is viable at all.
In Mexico City, the mood was the opposite. Mexico has never built long-haul fiber faster than it is building it right now.
Both are true. The distance between them is the story.
What got built
Axtel activated more than 1,100 kilometers from Querétaro into Texas in July 2025. Neutral Networks put NEXT into service in May 2026, 1,120 kilometers through Monterrey into Laredo, with two of its three ducts deliberately left empty for whatever comes next. C3ntro’s Tikva is running 2,700 kilometers up the Pacific side toward Phoenix, financed, due this year, with a hyperscaler committed before the first splice went in.
Gabriel Navarro said this at the NEXT launch: “This infrastructure is ready, prepared for the next 20 or 30 years. The industry can be certain that if it makes a major investment, the country has the required infrastructure.”
A few months earlier, closing Tikva’s financing, Eli Sitt put it in the words that matter most in this business. The deal, he said, “moves us decisively from vision and planning to full-scale execution.”
They are both right about the east, and about the west. The middle is still on the vision side of Sitt’s sentence.
What the market already told us
In May 2023, Fermaca Networks announced FN-1: two thousand kilometers of underground fiber from El Paso to Querétaro through Chihuahua, Torreón, Aguascalientes and Guadalajara. A hundred and seventy-five million dollars for phase one. In service by the end of 2025.
The market did not wait to see it. Zayo signed on to sell capacity over it within a week. Gold Data signed on to deliver services over it ten weeks later. An infrastructure fund backed phase one in 2024. The route is not in service today.
I’ve stopped reading that sequence as a story about one company’s timeline. Three commercial commitments inside ten weeks is the industry shouting about how badly it wants this road. Whatever else FN-1 has or hasn’t done, it proved the demand beyond argument. That proof is still sitting there, unclaimed.
The road is worth more than the crossing
It is tempting, from where I sit, to talk about this as an El Paso story. It isn’t.
Read that list of cities again. Chihuahua. Torreón. Aguascalientes. Guadalajara. A modern underground route does not just pass through places. It creates them. Every one of those cities becomes a candidate for an interconnection point, a regional cache, an edge node, a reason for a content provider to stop treating central and northern Mexico as somewhere traffic drives past on its way to Querétaro.
Ciudad Juárez runs one of the densest manufacturing bases on the continent, and its computer manufacturing employment grew 238 percent in five years. The corridor that serves it should be as modern as the products coming out of it.
And then there are the operators nobody writes about. The regional ISPs and WISPs along that line, the ones buying transit at a premium because there is no competitive path anywhere near them. A new road changes their economics more than it changes anyone’s.
The half that exists
The northern end is built. Our crossing runs underground beneath the river into Ciudad Juárez, several conduits of high-capacity fiber, in service since late 2025, and we have a team ready to build a second. MEX-IX El Paso keeps adding networks without the corridor, peering Akamai, Meta, Gcore, Totalplay and operators across northern Mexico. It is growing on its own. What it could become with a real road underneath it is a different conversation entirely.
What is missing is the southbound run, and the three years of permits, right of way and landowner conversations that go into one. Tikva and NEXT are proof that this can be done here, now, at a price the industry has already shown it will pay.
Back to the desert
That campus outside Las Cruces will come online. Others will follow it, on both sides of the line.
When their operators go looking for a path into the middle of Mexico, they will find the same thing anyone has found since 2023. A road that everyone agreed was necessary, that three companies committed to before it existed, and that still has not been built.
The demand was never the missing piece.
