First-of-its-kind partnership culminates in the groundbreaking of a new Internet Exchange Point (IXP) at Wichita State University, advancing AI-ready network infrastructure across the US heartland and establishing a blueprint for future rollouts.
Wichita, KS and New York, USA. Wichita State University (WSU), in partnership with DE-CIX, the world’s leading Internet Exchange (IX) operator, and Connected Nation Internet Exchange Points (CNIXP), today celebrates the groundbreaking of a new Internet Exchange Point (IXP) – a facility which will enable networks to interconnect directly on a high-performance Internet Exchange (IX) platform – on its Innovation Campus. This will be the first of many university deployments in the initiative, designed to address regional interconnectivity gaps and enable low-latency, AI-ready network infrastructure across the US.
This unique initiative represents a return to the collaborative, public-minded ethos that defined the early ARPANET. “What’s powerful is that we’re returning to the Internet’s roots,” says Tonya Witherspoon, AVP of Workforce Development and Industry Engagement at Wichita State University. “ARPANET began as a collaboration between government and academia, building the neutral, non-partisan network infrastructure that enabled everything else to flourish. That model worked then, and it’s urgently needed now. Universities can once again serve as anchor institutions – not just for research and education, but for a fairer, more resilient digital economy.”
The new Kansas IXP marks the first deployment in a nationwide blueprint, uniquely devised by CNIXP and DE-CIX, to roll out at least 125 neutral IXP facilities in partnership with universities across the US. According to Hunter Newby, Owner of Newby Ventures and Joint Venture Partner in CNIXP, “We’ve already received Letters of Intent from over 10 universities and municipalities across the country to replicate what we’re building here in Wichita. This is the first, and it’s far more than symbolic. It’s a working model for rearchitecting US digital infrastructure, one regional exchange at a time.”
By situating IXPs on university campuses, CNIXP and DE-CIX are helping establish a new layer of national infrastructure: open, neutral, scalable, and future proof. For Wichita, already a hub of aerospace and advanced manufacturing, the new IXP will offer regional enterprises, cloud providers, and hyperscalers the performance they need to keep innovating in the AI era.
Tonya continues: “There are still 14 states in the US without an IXP facility, Kansas being one of them. In these states, businesses are forced to operate on-premises, disconnected from the performance and resilience that interconnection enables, or suffer the latency handicap of sourcing interconnection from neighboring states, increasing the distance data must travel. With reshoring and AI now national priorities, this is no longer sustainable. Neutral IXPs hosted by universities offer a modern path forward – one that blends innovation, economic development, and public trust.”
This initiative marks another milestone in DE-CIX’s 30th anniversary year and reflects a growing urgency for distributed, low-latency infrastructure as artificial intelligence use-cases move focus from model training to real-time inference. Applications such as autonomous robotics, agentic AI, and industrial automation all demand sub-10 millisecond response times, made possible only through local interconnection at the network edge.
“As AI evolves, so too must the infrastructure behind it in order to achieve near-zero latency” said Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “To bring AI to life, DE-CIX orchestrates the interplay of clouds, networks, and AI agents across a global, latency-optimized ecosystem – one in which the IXP in Wichita is set to become a role model for similar set-ups and the creation of an AI-ready new Internet.”
Tonya Witherspoon, Hunter Newby, and Ivo Ivanov sat down on Tuesday to discuss the initiative, and how edge strategies, Internet Exchanges, and smarter interconnection can help reduce latency, boost resilience, and power next-generation AI infrastructure. Readers can watch the webinar, titled “Latency Kills: Solving the Bottleneck of Round-Trip Delay to Unlock the Future of AI”, by clicking here.
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