Thursday Roundup: EdgeConneX, Empire, DE-CIX

A partnership, a buildout completion, and some AI agent news:

EdgeConneX is entering Australia for the first time. They have formed a 50-50 joint venture partnership with Stockland, one of cht country’s largest diversified property groups. The JV will start out with hyperscale data center campuses in Sydney and Melbourne, and have 450MW of power secured. That will be plenty to keep them busy for now, but I’m sure we will hear more over time. EdgeConneX has appointed Chris Maher to lead its efforts down under.

New York’s Madison County is almost done with its last mile network buildout. The county has been working on it for 3 years, and the first towns online are Sullivan, Lenox, and Cazenovia. Empire Fiber Internet will be providing the actual service, with some 3,600 homes and businesses passed. The project cost some $31M, including $12.7M from the USDA as well as state and county sources.

Lumen is teaming up with Snowflake to improve data flows in the enterprise space. The collaboration combines Lumen’s programmable network technology with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to make Lumen-derived data available to agents more cleanly and securely. The two companies already have hundreds of customers in common, and will be looking to build on this idea.

And DE-CIX is incorporating AI agents into its interconnection platform. Network customers can an AI agent to find, deploy, and manage IX connections for their network. The technology leverages DE-CIX’s open source MCP server, which can be accessed by compatible AI applications and agent platforms built off of any LLM. It can also write automation code involving DE-CIX services. I imagine we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!