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AMS-IX Lagos: a growing interconnection hub

AMS-IX NEWS

Wouter Ensing

Manager Partners

02 April 2026

When we launched AMS-IX Lagos in 2023, the ambition was clear: help build a stronger interconnection hub for West Africa, together with our partner MDXi, an Equinix Company. At the time, the Exchange started with roughly 25 connected networks, coming from the existing WAF-IX community.

We set our focus on the region as a whole rather than just Nigeria, to provide additional value to content providers and help accelerate their attraction to the region.

A couple of years later, it’s great to see how the platform is growing and how the ecosystem around it is taking shape.

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"Working closely with partners, we’ve been able to bring together different parts of the Internet industry."

Building the IX together

AMS-IX operates the peering platform itself, but building an Internet Exchange is really about building a community of networks. That’s something we choose to do with local partners who understand the local ecosystem. Working closely with partners, we’ve been able to bring together different parts of the Internet industry.

While both AMS-IX and Equinix maintain their neutrality, this close cooperation has been instrumental to the success.

Today the platform connects more than 50 networks, including global content and cloud providers like Meta, AWS, Microsoft and Cloudflare, bringing popular services and applications closer to users in the region. It also includes international backbone operators and carriers, helping connect West Africa to the wider global Internet. And of course, local and regional ISPs, the networks that ultimately deliver connectivity to businesses and households across Nigeria and beyond. When these different players start exchanging traffic locally, that’s when an Internet Exchange really starts to work as intended.

The numbers tell a story

Looking at the latest figures at the end of March 2026, the traffic growth has been very encouraging, and we anticipate new peaks in the coming months. What this really tells me is that networks are not just connecting, they are growing their presence on the platform.

Traffic shows exactly that trend. Peak traffic just reached 402 Gb/s in March this year, compared to 188 Gb/s at the end of 2025 and 95 Gb/s in 2024. In other words, peak traffic has doubled 4 years in a row. For such a young exchange, that kind of growth is a very good sign.

Another strong indicator of this momentum is the total traffic volume exchanged on the platform. In just the first three months of 2026, traffic has already reached 158 PB. To put that into perspective, the full-year volume for 2025 was 202 PB.

Looking ahead

What we are seeing today is still the early phase of the Internet Exchange. But the growth over the past years shows that the foundation is there. Watching the Lagos ecosystem take shape is incredibly rewarding, and I’m convinced the platform will continue to play an important role in strengthening connectivity across Nigeria and the wider West African region.