Interview with MDC

1. MDC says it doesn't sell colocation space, it orchestrates interconnection opportunities. What does that mean in practice, and how does it shape your approach to serving customers?

It means we don't just rent space and wait for customers to work out who else is in the building. A data center full of tenants who never connect is just expensive real estate. The value is the interconnection, and that is what we work on. So we serve customers differently from the first conversation. We start with where your network needs to go and who you need to reach, and work back from there. That is the difference between selling colocation and orchestrating interconnection. Space is the easy part, everyone has it. What is hard, and takes years to earn, is being the place where the connections a network needs are already there.

2. Carrier neutrality has been a cornerstone of MDC's strategy. Why is neutrality so important for creating valuable interconnection ecosystems?

We call this being Actively Neutral™, and it is what makes the ecosystem trustworthy. We do not compete with our customers and we never play favorites. The moment an operator favors one carrier over another, through pricing, access, or preferential treatment, every other network has a reason to hedge or look elsewhere. Neutrality removes that risk. It tells every network, large or small, that it competes on service and reach, not on its relationship with the landlord. But neutral does not mean passive. We are fierce and neutral advocates for our customers, working the ecosystem on their behalf and surfacing the connections that serve them. That is non-negotiable for us, and it is why density compounds over time. Each new network that joins makes the site more valuable to the next one, because they know the playing field will not shift underneath them.

3. How does MDC help customers discover and capitalize on interconnection opportunities that might not otherwise exist?

Because we sit at the center of the ecosystem, we can see matches our customers cannot see from inside their own businesses. A network knows its own needs. What it usually cannot see is that another network already with us has idle capacity on exactly the route it wants, or is the natural peer for its traffic. We can, because that is the picture we hold. So instead of leaving customers to discover each other through months of cold outreach, we see the match and make the introduction. They negotiate on their own terms and we do not take a cut. We earn only when the two networks actually connect in our facility, which keeps our interest aligned with theirs. That is what discovery looks like when interconnection is orchestrated rather than left to chance.

4. As demand for cross-border connectivity continues to grow, what role does MDC's expanding infrastructure footprint play in supporting that growth?

Cross-border data traffic between the U.S. and Mexico is growing roughly 30% year over year, and established U.S. markets are running into real constraints: power availability, permitting timelines, community pushback in places like Northern Virginia and Phoenix. That is pushing demand toward the border and into northern Mexico. Our footprint is built to absorb that shift. We operate seven carrier-neutral border sites today and ten International Fiber Crossings, with three more sites in development in Mexico: Querétaro, Cancún, and Veracruz. Each site combines interconnection, fiber crossings, and colocation in one place, and every new site extends the same model rather than starting from scratch. So as demand moves, the infrastructure and the interconnection density are already there to meet it.

5. El Paso has become a key hub in MDC's ecosystem. What makes this market so strategically important, and how do you see it evolving?

El Paso is a hub in its own right, on the strength of the market itself. Together with Ciudad Juárez, it forms a single metro area of roughly three million people, with digital demand on both sides of the line at once. That scale alone makes it a market, not a regional stop. One of the world's leading hyperscalers chose our El Paso site for an interconnection deployment, which is itself a recognition that this market matters. We later ran a joint workshop there with telecom players from across El Paso to build on that momentum. It confirmed what we had believed about this market for years, and it is part of why we now have an expansion project underway there, which we will share more on shortly.

6. MDC recently announced its new site and International Fiber Crossing in Brownsville. What opportunities will this create for carriers, networks, and enterprises operating across the region?

Brownsville is a good example of how we think about growth: we build where demand already exists, not where we hope it will show up. Several operators in our ecosystem had flagged the Gulf Coast as a gap in their cross-border redundancy, with traffic serving that corridor routing through McAllen or Laredo and picking up distance and latency it did not need. Brownsville closes that gap on the same carrier-neutral terms as every crossing in our portfolio, and it joins the network as our newest border site and International Fiber Crossing. It is now one of ten active crossings we operate across seven border markets, but the number matters less than the principle behind it: we build to where our customers' networks actually need to connect, ahead of that moment rather than after it.

7. You've successfully built a neutral interconnection model along the US-Mexico border. What made you confident that this approach could be replicated in Mexico?

What gave us confidence was not a statistic, it was a capability we already understood well: seeing where networks need to connect and making that connection happen, wherever it needs to be. On the border, that meant building the corridors two networks needed to reach each other. In Mexico, that same capability applies to a different kind of traffic. The growth coming from AI, content, and hyperscaler demand needs connectivity corridors just as much as any carrier does. What we do is orchestrate that. We sit on neutral ground where American and Mexican operators can meet, and we make the connections they need instead of leaving them to guess from outside. It is not a new model for a new market, it is the same job we have always done, applied to where the traffic is now headed.

8. MDC's partnership with the Manta consortium includes the development of neutral Cable Landing Hubs in Cancún and Veracruz. Why are these facilities strategically important for the region's digital future?

This partnership means a great deal to us. Liberty Networks, Gold Data, and Sparkle did not have to choose MDC to land Manta in Cancún and Veracruz, and we are genuinely grateful that they did. I believe they chose us for the reasons this whole conversation has been about: because we orchestrate connections rather than simply house them, because our neutrality protects every partner equally, and because we have spent years earning that trust at the hardest crossings on the border. What matters most to me is that this is a partnership, not a transaction. We are not building these hubs for Manta, we are building them with Manta. The people who carry the traffic and the people who create the place where it meets are designing it together. And that is what makes the opportunity real for the region. For a long time, Latin America has leaned on essentially one great interconnection hub, Miami. Cancún can become a second, not in place of Miami but alongside it, a hub of the region's own, closer to home and open to every network on equal terms. That is a future worth building, and we are grateful to be building it in good company.