DE-CIX and its role for finance in Frankfurt
DE-CIX is an internet exchange operator. Its exchange in Frankfurt, founded in 1995, is in its own words "the world's leading interconnection platform": networks and companies connect there and exchange data with each other directly instead of over the public internet.
For a bank or a payment firm, DE-CIX is the place in Frankfurt where its own network can meet the internet providers of its customers and the clouds it rents on a short, known path.
What DE-CIX operates in Frankfurt
DE-CIX Frankfurt connects over 1,000 local, regional and global networks, and access to the exchange is available in more than 30 data centers in the Frankfurt area. About 80 percent of the connected networks can be reached through the route servers, so a new participant exchanges traffic with most of them after one technical setup and does not need a separate agreement with each.
The switching runs on DE-CIX Apollon, which DE-CIX describes as its carrier-grade Ethernet platform with ports of 100, 400 and 800 Gigabit Ethernet. According to DE-CIX, the Frankfurt setup is fully redundant, with an optical backbone of 128 terabits per second total capacity and four supernodes in a leaf-spine design.
Traffic records at DE-CIX Frankfurt
On December 9, 2025, a UEFA Champions League matchday, DE-CIX Frankfurt reached an all-time peak of 18.73 terabits per second at 20:11 CET. Over the year, 48 exabytes passed through the Frankfurt exchange, 6 percent more than in 2024, and 79 exabytes passed through all DE-CIX exchanges worldwide. DE-CIX names streaming, AI workloads and connected devices as the reasons for the growth.
The record before that, 18.11 terabits per second in November 2024, came on an evening when several game releases and updates went out at the same time.
DE-CIX locations in Germany and abroad
In Germany, DE-CIX runs exchanges in Frankfurt, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and the Ruhr region. Abroad, its locations include New York, Dallas, Chicago, Madrid, Lisbon, Istanbul, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Tokyo. DE-CIX states that it offers interconnection in over 50 metro markets on five continents, that more than 3,000 networks are connected worldwide, and that its exchanges can be reached from over 600 cities in more than 80 countries.
In Hesse, DE-CIX is listed among the members of the House of Digital Transformation. The page on internet exchange points explains how an exchange works and which other exchanges operate in Germany.
Why banks, exchanges and payment firms connect in Frankfurt
The exchange and the financial institutions sit in one metropolitan area. Deutsche Börse hosts the primary back-ends of Eurex and Xetra in the FR2 data center of Equinix in Frankfurt, where trading participants rent co-location space next to the matching engines; the page on low latency trading covers what that space buys. The page on data centers for finance in Frankfurt describes the colocation market around the exchange.
Ivo Ivanov, writing as CEO of DE-CIX International, sets out the case for banks in Banking the bits and the bytes. When a customer logs in to online banking, the data normally travels over the public internet between the customer's provider and the bank. If the bank peers with that provider at an exchange, the path is shorter and stays off the open internet, for every customer of that provider. The same holds for a webshop that uses a bank's payment service: when the shop's provider interconnects with the bank, the payment traffic takes the direct route.
DE-CIX services a financial firm can use
Closed User Groups let a company build its own interconnection environment, set apart from public peering, and exchange data only with partners it selects. In IT Finanzmagazin (in German), Thomas King of DE-CIX applies this to PSD2: a bank can place the API it opens to third-party providers in such a group, so the providers reach it and the rest of the internet does not. In a second article (in German) he presents closed user groups as a replacement for the MPLS networks banks use to connect partners and branches.
For the cloud, DE-CIX connects over 50 cloud service providers at its Cloud Exchange through DirectCLOUD, and its Microsoft Azure Peering Service gives direct access to Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft cloud services under binding SLAs. Ivanov ties this to cloud concentration risk: a bank that spreads work across several clouds should reach them from physically separate locations, or one failed connection becomes a single point of failure again. The supervisory side is on the pages on cloud exit strategy and sovereign cloud for banks.
AI workloads and the AI Internet Exchange
In September 2025, DE-CIX launched the first phase of its AI Internet Exchange (AI-IX), available in Frankfurt and at all other DE-CIX locations. At launch, more than 50 AI-relevant networks were connected, among them providers of AI inference and of GPUs as a service, along with over 160 cloud on-ramps. A second phase is to add Ultra Ethernet for distributed model training.
Ivanov counts AI applications such as customer service bots and process automation among the latency-sensitive services a bank sources from the cloud. A bank that runs a language model at an outside provider adds the network path to that provider to every request. The compute side is on the pages on AI infrastructure in banking, sovereign AI and the AI gigafactory plans in Europe.
Hesse's agenda for data centers
The Hessian digital ministry's agenda for data centers in Hesse (in German) calls the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main area, with DE-CIX, one of the most important digital hubs in the world and the strongest data center location in continental Europe. The same paper names the price: the concentration raises the demands on power grids, land, cooling and permits, and it makes single regions a systemic dependency.
Frankfurt/Rhine-Main is to remain the core location for hyperscale and colocation capacity. Growth is to move in part to further regional hubs outside the core cluster, on brownfield land and in model regions. Capacity figures by state are on the page on data centers in Germany, and the energy rules on the page on the German Energy Efficiency Act.
Upcoming events on digital infrastructure
Who owns DE-CIX?
DE-CIX names eco, the Association of the Internet Industry, as its sole shareholder. The association says it has around 1,000 members and is the largest association of the internet industry in Europe.
Where is DE-CIX in Frankfurt?
DE-CIX Frankfurt is a platform spread over many buildings. Access is available in more than 30 data centers in the Frankfurt area, and the where to connect list on the DE-CIX site names the sites. A firm that already rents space in one of them can connect without its own fiber across the city.
How does a company connect to DE-CIX?
A network with its own public AS number orders a port in one of the enabled data centers and can then peer. For the Microsoft Azure Peering Service DE-CIX asks for no minimum bandwidth but for a public AS number; a company without one connects through a DE-CIX partner. DirectCLOUD works the same way: an internet provider or data center enables its enterprise customers, or the enterprise connects to DE-CIX directly.
DE-CIX and Finance Loop
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, digital payments, cloud and blockchain solutions. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.
Finance Loop is open to anyone who works in finance or builds technology for it. A membership opens the network, a sponsored meetup puts a topic such as interconnection or cloud access on the agenda, and with your own event Finance Loop comes to your venue.