The Iberian Peninsula has established itself as the world’s leading distributed digital capital and is gearing up to become Europe’s next major AI hub. That is the bold assertion with which Dstream Group has unveiled  “The Iberian Distributed Digital Capital: Powering Cloud & AI through a New Geography of Digital Hubs”, a study commissioned by German internet exchange (IX) operator De-Cix.

According to the study, the Iberian Peninsula offers a unique digital ecosystem, ready to meet the demands of AI thanks to a distributed infrastructure that interconnects the strategic hubs of Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon. Unlike the traditional model of digital capitals concentrated in a single city, such as Frankfurt, London and New York, this approach combines geographical diversity with the low-latency connectivity required by AI and other data-intensive workloads.

Low-latency connectivity
The Iberian ecosystem comprises 35 submarine cables with 20 coastal landing points, 13 major terrestrial backbone networks, 13 internet exchange points, more than 100 data centres and over 800 networks. Madrid’s interconnection hub is connected to the coastal submarine cable and interconnection hubs in Barcelona and Lisbon through low-latency connectivity of between 7 and 8 milliseconds.

These features enable seamless data exchange for AI and other workloads distributed across the Iberian Peninsula. The rapid growth of AI has helped shape this digital capital, driving unprecedented growth in the data centre sector, which is forecast to add nearly 9 gigawatts of new facilities over the coming years.

Strategic interconnection location
The Iberian Peninsula is a strategic hub linking Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, offering a secure, sovereign and high-performance infrastructure for AI applications, both for the domestic market and for export. In addition to the hubs in Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon, the Iberian ecosystem is complemented by those in Valencia, Bilbao and Sines, and by the regions of Aragon and Extremadura.

De-Cix is contributing to this infrastructure by providing three internet exchange points. The company, which is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its entry into the Iberian market, opened its Madrid centre in 2016, now the largest on the Iberian Peninsula. In 2018, it opened its Lisbon centre, followed by its Barcelona centre in 2021. Company CEO Ivo Ivanov believes that the study “clearly demonstrates the distinctive character and importance of the Iberian ecosystem, which is unique in the world”.

Serge Radovcic, co-author of the study, explains, “As a gateway to five continents, the Iberian Peninsula is truly connected on a global scale.” Furthermore, he notes, “It has the potential to establish itself as Europe’s next AI hub. In the age of artificial intelligence, direct and secure network interconnection through internet exchange points has become an increasingly strategic necessity, not only for network operators, but also for data centre operators and businesses”.

^{Photo: De-Cix}