NL-ix 25 years
Building the Infrastructure Behind Europe’s Digital Economy
Building the Infrastructure Behind Europe’s Digital Economy
For most people, the Internet feels invisible. You open an application, stream a video, run a cloud workload — and everything simply works.
Behind the scenes, however, there is an enormous amount of infrastructure making that possible. Networks exchange traffic, data moves between datacenters, and digital platforms rely on interconnection layers that must operate with absolute reliability.
For 25 years, NL-ix has been part of that invisible foundation.
When we started in the early 2000s, the Internet was still a relatively small ecosystem. Interconnection was largely concentrated in a few major hubs, many networks depended heavily on upstream Transit providers to reach the wider Internet, and “the cloud” was still mostly something you looked at in the sky.
Twenty-five years later, the Internet looks very different.
From Network Peering to critical Digital Infrastructure
The Internet Exchange ecosystem has matured dramatically over the past two decades. Interconnection has become critical digital infrastructure.
Traffic volumes that were once measured in megabits are now measured in terabits. Entire industries depend on low-latency connectivity between networks, datacenters and platforms.
Behind that growth lies a continuous evolution of the NL-ix network itself.
As customer requirements increased, interconnection moved from best-effort to business-critical. This drove fundamental changes in the platform architecture — including the introduction of a fully separate second network fabric to ensure resilience, even in critical situations.
At the same time, the NL-ix platform scaled into a high-capacity European backbone. Today, all metros are interconnected through a 400 Gbps architecture, forming a single, coherent interconnection layer across more than 100 datacenters — designed for predictable performance and ultra-low latency across the entire footprint.
Throughout this evolution, efficiency remained a constant focus — continuously reducing the energy footprint per transported bit while maintaining performance and scale.
From Infrastructure to The Leading European Business Exchange
Building a high-performance network is only part of the story.
At NL-ix, we believe interconnection should not be passive. It should actively enable how businesses operate, compete and stay in control.
That is why we build functionality directly into the platform itself.
A clear example is NL-ix DDoS Protection, built natively into the NL-ix network. By mitigating large-scale attacks within the exchange fabric and filtering malicious traffic at the interconnection layer, networks remain connected — even under pressure.
This reflects a fundamental shift. Interconnection is no longer just about exchanging traffic — it is about delivering control, resilience and simplicity at the point where data enters and leaves the organisation.
As digital ecosystems become more complex, organisations do not need more fragmented solutions — they need clarity and control.
NL-ix addresses this by integrating interconnection services into a single, coherent platform, where networks, cloud environments and applications are connected through one interconnection layer.
With Sovereign Internet, NL-ix extends that control further — providing visibility into how data travels across networks and enabling organisations to steer traffic across trusted infrastructure, on their own terms.
Together, these developments define NL-ix today: not just an exchange, but The Leading European Business Exchange — where interconnection becomes a strategic layer for performance, security and control.
Experience Matters
Delivering a platform that operates at this level — combining scale, resilience, control and continuous innovation — requires more than technology alone, its the result of something that can not easily be replicated: experience.
At NL-ix, that experience has been built over 25 years of operating interconnection infrastructure in a rapidly evolving Internet landscape.
Many of the engineers working within NL-ix have seen the Internet evolve from its early Peering environments to today’s highly dynamic interconnection ecosystems. The result is a network built not only on technology, but on accumulated knowledge of how the Internet actually behaves.
That experience is particularly valuable today, because understanding how the Internet evolves also helps anticipate where it is heading — and how interconnection infrastructure needs to adapt.
The Next Internet Will Look Different
If the past 25 years were about building the foundations of the Internet, the next 25 will be about scaling it to support an entirely new digital reality.
Four developments are already reshaping the interconnection landscape.
AI and Data Gravity
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the largest drivers of network traffic.
Training models, moving massive datasets between datacenters and delivering AI-powered services to users all require enormous data flows. The infrastructure connecting datacenters, cloud environments and networks will need to handle unprecedented traffic volumes with extremely low latency.
But AI does not just increase the amount of data moving across networks — it also changes how that data moves.
Infrastructure-to-Infrastructure Traffic
AI workloads spread across multiple platforms and datacenters, and data increasingly moves between systems rather than simply between users and applications.
Models are trained in one environment, datasets are stored in another, and applications consume results somewhere else entirely. At the same time, modern digital services rely on complex ecosystems of APIs, microservices and cloud platforms continuously exchanging data.
This means that a growing share of Internet traffic now flows between infrastructures — cloud-to-cloud, datacenter-to-datacenter and application-to-application.
As these east-west data flows expand across networks and platforms, the underlying connectivity layer becomes more critical — and more complex.
Digital Sovereignty
This growing complexity also raises new questions.
Across Europe, organisations are becoming increasingly aware that digital infrastructure is not just a technical issue — it is also a strategic one.
When data constantly moves between platforms, clouds and networks, understanding where that data travels — and which infrastructure carries it — becomes increasingly important.
This is where digital sovereignty enters the conversation.
Governments, enterprises and critical industries are looking more closely at how their connectivity is structured and who operates the infrastructure their data depends on. As a result, the demand for independent infrastructure partners capable of providing resilient and transparent connectivity is growing rapidly.
Application-Aware Infrastructure
As organisations demand greater visibility and control over how their data moves, the infrastructure itself will also need to become more intelligent and context-aware.
Different applications and workloads place very different demands on connectivity — whether in latency, bandwidth, availability, confidentiality, segmentation or sovereign routing. A financial transaction, healthcare application or AI workload each requires a different balance of performance, resilience, security and control.
This is driving the evolution towards application-aware infrastructure: interconnection platforms that understand the requirements and sensitivity of the applications and data flows they support, and can adapt connectivity behaviour accordingly.
Building the Next Phase of Interconnection
Connectivity will need to become more scalable, more distributed, more intelligent and more resilient, because businesses increasingly demand greater transparency and control over how their data moves.
For NL-ix, 25 years of operational experience form the foundation for what comes next: building the interconnection layer that enables businesses across Europe to connect, collaborate and exchange data reliably — and on their own terms.
As interconnection becomes increasingly tied to application performance, security, sovereignty and business continuity, it is also becoming a strategic business decision rather than purely a technical one.
In the years ahead, conversations around digital infrastructure will increasingly move beyond the network domain alone. The CIO, CISO and business leadership will play a growing role in how organisations structure, secure and control their connectivity, data flows and digital ecosystems, because interconnection is now a strategic cornerstone of modern business operations.
As our CEO puts it:
Interconnection used to be a technical optimisation. Today it is strategic infrastructure. NL-ix is building the European Business Exchange — a sovereign interconnection platform where businesses, networks and cloud providers can exchange data on their own terms.
Jan Hoogenboom
Twenty-five years of operating Internet infrastructure provides a strong foundation for that ambition — not because the past defines the future, but because experience enables us to anticipate and lead where the Internet is heading next.
Connecting Europe’s networks — and the businesses that depend on them — remains at the core of what NL-ix is building for the decades ahead.