DE-CIX and Ooredoo Oman to launch Gulf Gateway-IX in early 2027

DE-CIX and Ooredoo Oman have signed an agreement to build Gulf Gateway-IX, a carrier-neutral internet exchange scheduled to go live in early 2027 that will interconnect the country's two subsea corridors in Muscat and Salalah under a single national exchange fabric.

The partners announced the deal on Tuesday. Gulf Gateway-IX will operate as a single virtual exchange across Oman, with a unified peering policy and a single port. Networks, enterprises and content providers peering in Muscat will exchange traffic directly with peers connected in Salalah, and vice versa, without separate arrangements at each site.

Where will the exchange sit?

The IX will be housed in Ooredoo Oman's data centres in Barka, north of Muscat, and in Salalah. The two sites lie roughly 1,000 km apart and will be directly interconnected with optimized latency, forming what the partners describe as an express corridor between the north and south of the country.

Access will not be limited to Ooredoo facilities. The exchange will also be reachable through Equinix's MC1 data centre in Muscat and SN1 data centre in Salalah, extending the fabric to carriers and content providers already present in those third-party sites.

DE-CIX will run the technical operations through its 'DE-CIX as a Service' programme, the framework the Frankfurt-based operator uses to build and manage exchanges on behalf of partners in markets it does not operate directly.

Why do the two cities matter?

Muscat is Oman's primary northern gateway, with major subsea cables landing from the GCC and Asia. Salalah is the southern landing point, connecting directly to East Africa, Europe and India. Linking the two hubs lets networks route around regional subsea disruptions without resorting to international transit workarounds — a resilience argument aimed at operators exposed to cable cuts in the Red Sea and other maritime choke points.

What does this change for Oman's connectivity market? In practical terms, it collapses a two-city interconnection problem into one commercial relationship. A network buying a port in either city gains reach to both subsea corridors, and to the cables landing at each.

What are the commercial claims?

Ooredoo Oman CEO Saoud Al Riyami framed the project in expansive terms. He said Gulf Gateway-IX will transform Oman into one unified digital hub by removing geographic disparities in connectivity, driving inward investment for hyperscale data centres, edge computing and AI infrastructure.

"For our domestic enterprises, this fabric guarantees sovereign, ultra-low-latency connectivity essential to scale artificial intelligence, cloud workloads, and industrial automation across all governorates," Al Riyami said in a statement.

He also pitched the regional case: "Regionally, it provides GCC and East African operators with a direct, high-capacity alternative to vulnerable maritime choke points. Globally, it cements the Sultanate as the premier, carrier-neutral transit nexus bridging Asia, Africa, and Europe, unlocking high-value foreign digital investment and accelerating our non-oil economic diversification under Oman Vision 2040."

Those claims belong to the vendor and operator side. The investment case for hyperscale data centres and AI infrastructure depends on demand materialising after launch, not on the fabric alone. The concrete, verifiable facts are narrower: two interconnected sites, roughly 1,000 km of fibre between them, carrier-neutral access in four data centres, and a single peering policy across both.

The reference to Oman Vision 2040 places the project within the government's stated aim of diversifying the economy away from oil, a policy context that has shaped recent telecom and digital infrastructure investment in the Gulf.

What happens next?

The timeline is the early 2027 go-live. Until then, the work is construction and interconnection of the Barka and Salalah sites, integration with the Equinix facilities, and the recruitment of peering networks — the metric that will determine whether the single-fabric model draws traffic away from established regional exchanges. The partners have not disclosed financial terms or capacity targets for the project.