Summary
- GNM has deployed its first US PoPs at Equinix MI1 in Miami and Equinix sites in Ashburn.
- The locations form a protected East Coast ring connected to GNM’s European backbone and GNM IX.
- The expansion adds transatlantic interconnection options for carriers, cloud providers, content networks, and data centre customers.
GNM has launched its first North American points of presence in Miami and Ashburn, extending its European backbone into two major US interconnection markets.
The Dutch internet exchange and backbone operator has deployed infrastructure at Equinix MI1 in Miami and Equinix facilities in Ashburn, Virginia, including DC1 to DC15 and DC21. The locations are configured as a protected East Coast ring and connected to GNM’s existing network.
Both sites connect directly to GNM IX, the company’s internet exchange platform. GNM says the platform supports more than 700 connected networks and peak traffic above 10.95Tbps, giving network operators another route for exchanging traffic between North America and Europe.
Transatlantic connectivity depends on physical sites
The expansion sits outside Europe geographically, but it affects European data centre and cloud markets because transatlantic services depend on resilient transport, interconnection, and peering. Subsea cables, metro fibre, optical equipment, PoPs, and data centre meet me rooms all form part of that service chain.
Miami and Ashburn serve different functions in that chain. Miami is a major connectivity hub for subsea systems linking North America, Latin America, and Europe, while Ashburn sits inside Northern Virginia, one of the world’s largest data centre and interconnection markets.
By placing infrastructure in both locations, GNM gains access to international subsea traffic and the concentration of data centre capacity around Washington DC. The protected ring design also gives customers a more resilient structure than a single node expansion.
Route resilience remains part of the wider data centre service. Facilities can have redundant power feeds, UPS systems, generators, and diverse cooling loops, but customers still need reliable network paths to reach users, cloud regions, and other data centres.
Network providers follow dense data centre markets
GNM’s move reflects the pull of major data centre clusters. Network providers tend to expand where cloud platforms, carriers, subsea systems, content networks, and enterprise customers are already concentrated.
Ashburn remains important because of its scale, while Miami offers strong access to traffic flows across the Americas and the Atlantic. GNM’s European customers gain a more direct route into those markets, while US customers gain another route back into Europe.
AI workloads add more traffic to those routes. Training, inference, storage, replication, software platforms, and enterprise access all create traffic between regions. Not every workload has the same latency needs, but capacity, resilience, and predictable routing still affect where data centre capacity can be used effectively.
GNM now claims more than 90 PoPs globally, with infrastructure across Europe, Asia, and North America. The Miami and Ashburn deployments give its European backbone a stronger presence in two US markets that carry significant weight in global digital infrastructure.
The expansion is not a data centre build, but it is still relevant to the infrastructure behind data centre services. A facility’s commercial value depends partly on the quality and diversity of the networks available to customers inside and beyond the building.
