Artificial intelligence represents the biggest technological shake-up for a generation. It’s revolutionizing economies, transforming workplaces, and the conversation is already moving toward autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, and countless consumer-facing AI products that would have seemed like fantasy just a few short years ago.
But as Matthieu Bourguignon, Senior Vice President and Head of Europe at Nokia, made clear at DE-CIX’s 30th Anniversary Summit, the current state of network infrastructure is dangerously out of step with AI’s trajectory. “If you look at 2030, a significant part of the network traffic will be driven by AI,” he warned. Speaking to an audience of data center, telco, and enterprise leaders, Bourguignon called for a fundamental rethink of how infrastructure is designed, delivered, and distributed. “AI is changing everything – bandwidth needs, latency expectations, the way data centers are built, even where they are located.”
He’s right, of course, and it was interesting to hear my own thoughts reflected in his words. It is clear that the traditional model of centralized cloud and long-haul networking cannot keep pace with the distributed, latency-sensitive nature of AI workloads. While large-scale AI training can tolerate longer latency, real-time AI inference, which powers everything from autonomous systems to real-time analytics, cannot. Inference is where latency becomes a business-critical factor, and we as the digital infrastructure industry need to push the boundaries of what is possible, Bourguignon said.
The journey towards Zero-Latency
“Some use cases,” he continued, “are already pushing toward sub-3 or sub-2 millisecond thresholds. That kind of performance isn’t going to come from business-as-usual architectures.” Matthieu highlighted how power availability is already dictating the location of hyperscale training facilities, while inference will demand edge-based processing “on-prem or within 50 to 70 kilometers” of the end user. And again here, I am in complete agreement. That’s why, in the coming years, AI will increase the need for more agile, sovereign, and scalable interconnection models, with hundreds or even thousands of hyper-localized edge servers and exchanges distributed across the landscape. I like to think of this as our journey is towards Zero-Latency.
But we must start planning for that now. Traffic growth continues to skyrocket, and AI has in no way slowed this down. We’ve seen it on the DE-CIX exchanges, with traffic growing by 130% in five years. Matthieu cited discussions he’d had with a major telecom service provider who is already forecasting AI-induced traffic growth of more than 24% annually. But as well as capacity, security and resilience are also likely to come under strain. Bourguignon’s keynote also raised the double-edged sword of quantum, noting that the “Q-Day”, when quantum computing breaks today’s encryption standards, is fast approaching. For Matthieu, these challenges converge on a single point: “We need to invent new networks. Connectivity isn’t peripheral to AI, it’s foundational.” And with that, he turned his attention to DE-CIX and the role of interconnection in shaping the next phase of digital evolution.
Inside the DE-CIX 30th Anniversary Summit
These thoughts and many others were shared at the DE-CIX Global Interconnection Summit, a one-day gathering in Frankfurt that marked 30 years since DE-CIX was founded by a handful of pioneering German ISPs. The anniversary event served not only as a retrospective of DE-CIX’s role in building one of the world’s most important interconnection ecosystems, but also as a forward-looking summit exploring what comes next for digital infrastructure in the age of AI, edge computing, and real-time everything.
Dozens of speakers provided their insights throughout the day, including Dr. Bernd Lohmann, CTO at Bayer AG; Stephan Tesch, Datacenter Network Architect at Daimler Truck AG; Claudia Plattner, President of the German Federal Office for Information Security; Paul Rendek, Director, Dstream Group; and Simon Metzger, Team Lead Infrastructure Engineering at dmTECH.
Connectivity as a truly strategic enabler
All speakers shared their insights about the technical realities of hybrid, multi-cloud, and software-defined connectivity at scale – demonstrating the changing face of enterprise connectivity, where peering and direct interconnection are becoming essential to modern business cases and corporate network design. Bernd Lohmann, CTO of Bayer AG, commented “All you need is speed”, highlighting the life-saving benefits of resilient and high-performance connectivity to AI models and describing how their labs now handle 30 terabytes of research data daily to accelerate drug development for conditions like Parkinson’s. Stefan Tesch, a data center network architect at Daimler Truck, emphasized the importance of the scalability and flexibility of connectivity, as well as a multi-vendor approach for both cost and resilience reasons.
Claudia Plattner, President of the German Federal Office for Information Security, encouraged companies to invest in protecting their digital assets, commenting: “If you have your assets in order and they’re well-protected, that usually means you have a pretty well-running IT business. And we all know what that’s worth.” Josef Alpers, from EFS consulting, brought the topic of enterprise interconnection to a succinct conclusion: “Connectivity is no longer the background. It’s more like the backbone of digital transformation. It can be used as a truly strategic enabler for agility, compliance, security, and business growth.” Something all speakers agreed on.
Digital transformation can’t happen without digital interconnection
The many speakers at the event brought home the idea that digital transformation can’t happen without digital interconnection, and the stakes are higher than ever. This is DE-CIX’s mission. Initially connecting just three German Internet service providers at a newly established Internet Exchange in Frankfurt in 1995, DE-CIX has evolved into a major international operator of Internet Exchanges and global leader in interconnection services, now connecting a total of more than 4,000 networks across 60 markets worldwide. DE-CIX Frankfurt, the largest IX in Europe, contributes close to 4 billion Euros annually to the German national economy through optimizing the performance of digital services and increasing the resilience of company networks.
Through this infrastructure, DE-CIX aims not only to facilitate connectivity, but to standardize low latency, high performance, sovereignty, scalability, and security as core design principles of global network infrastructure. As Nokia’s Matthieu Bourguignon put it, to meet the expectations of AI “we need to invent a new way of designing the network”.