Speakers:

• Frédéric Schepens, managing partner, InfraEight (Chairperson)
• Taha Hussain, regional manager MENA, AMS-IX
• Demos Kyriacou, deputy CEO, chief operations officer & co-founder, WINGU AFRICA
• Ayotunde Coker, CEO, Open Access Data Centres
• Richard Petrie, CTO, LINX
• Mehmet Tik, edge strategy lead, Meta

The role of internet exchanges and peering can be overlooked in MEA digital transformation efforts. However, as this Datacloud Middle East 2026 panel discussion examined, the local exchange of traffic will be critical in the shift to inference and other latency-dependent use cases.

As hyperscalers race to deploy AI infrastructure across the region, the conversation between government ministers and technology leaders often settles on GPU clusters and power capacity. Interconnection infrastructure is a critical enabler of AI, but is often invisible.

That was the central theme of a recent panel discussion moderated by Frédéric Schepens, who challenged industry leaders to “stop treating interconnection as plumbing and start treating it as a strategic weapon” in determining which locations will win the AI race.