Latin America is entering a defining moment. AI workloads are accelerating, user expectations are rising, and the region’s digital infrastructure must evolve faster than ever. At the centre of this transformation is EdgeUno, a company reshaping how connectivity, cloud, edge compute, and data centres operate across the continent.

Launched in 2019 in Silicon Valley and headquartered in Miami, EdgeUno has already seen significant success in its first half-decade of existence. It has grown into one of the most connected infrastructure platforms in the region, with operations across 14 countries and more than 50 highly interconnected data centres. What began as a disruptive, asset-light model at EdgeUno has matured into a bold infrastructure strategy built for the AI age and focused on low latency, high availability, and rapid deployment at scale.

“We’re building what Latin America needs next,” says Mehmet Akcin, the company’s founder and CEO. “EdgeUno began as an agile disruptor; now, we’re becoming a key infrastructure foundation for AI across the region.”

In line with this, the next step in the company’s evolution will involve building high-value, unique fibre routes where connectivity is most needed, growing its edge data centre presence outside the key traditional hubs, and building its own AI-focused facilities in secondary markets where it makes sense. Akcin believes that now is the perfect time to take things up a gear as AI continues to surge, especially as factors like low latency and power availability are ever more important.

“The ‘edge’ is becoming mission-critical because many AI applications cannot tolerate high latency or centralised processing,” he says. “Edge compute will move from being optional to being essential.”

Closing gaps

When Akcin founded EdgeUno, he was not trying to replicate the traditional carrier model. Instead, he believed that something fresh and different was needed to finally shatter some of the barriers that remained to connectivity in many parts of Latin America.

“The internet landscape was fragmented between and within countries,” says Akcin. “There were different service providers, but nobody gluing everything together. Latencies were high, with limited coverage of high-quality data centres and edge services.”

His initial strategy at EdgeUno was more about fusing the best of the existing internet to boost quality connectivity than building infrastructure from scratch, staying fully carrier-neutral and vendor-agnostic to give customers full flexibility.

To do this, the company struck deals allowing it to blend and optimise capacity from leading backbone providers, mixing and matching the most modern, prime assets via terrestrial and subsea paths to enable the best possible latencies. EdgeUno also quickly expanded points-of-presence (PoPs) in data centres across Latin America to boost much-needed quality.

This strategy had the effect of making quality internet services more accessible even before building more infrastructure, offering new opportunities for not just EdgeUno but other players to leverage their assets. Furthermore, it gave local and global companies a simple way to expand rapidly across the continent through a single partner.

A new chapter

EdgeUno’s establishment of this foundational model in its first five years of existence has provided the springboard for the next phase, which will see the company expand its strategy beyond connectivity into full AI-centric edge infrastructure. For a start, it plans to begin investing in its own fibre routes rather than just leasing network assets, and is currently seeking funders to support rollouts. “There are some unique parts of Latin America that need connectivity,” says Akcin. “For example, today there is no way to directly connect efficiently and with high availability from Peru to Brazil. There are seven or eight unique routes that Latin America needs.”

Akcin explains that the company will focus on strategically designed terrestrial and subsea rollouts that close the most critical infrastructure gaps across Latin America. “These are not generic long-haul routes, but high-value corridors engineered to deliver real latency reductions, greater redundancy and higher resilience for AI and cloud workloads,” he says.

The flagship initiative is a direct terrestrial pathway linking the Andean region with the Brazilian economic core, eliminating today’s inefficient detours in routes and dramatically improving how traffic moves across the continent. Other possibilities being explored involve potential rollouts in the southernmost part of the Americas, as well as the deployment of intra-regional high-capacity transport in Brazil, cross-border connectivity in northern Latin America, diversity options in the Pacific and Atlantic, and high-availability routes between South America and Mexico.

“Any route that we construct will be built to deliver meaningful diversity and new redundancy, while future-proofing the region’s digital economy demands,” says Akcin. “And because EdgeUno is debt-free, it can execute its strategy with speed and invest where the market needs it most without waiting on legacy decision cycles.”

Closer to the edge

Meanwhile, as AI inference and real-time applications require compute close to end users, EdgeUno is expanding its edge data centre presence to further slash latency, boost performance, and enable a faster time to market for global and regional customers. In doing so, it is focusing on regions with the highest concentrations of digital consumers, enterprise demand, and mobile growth, while avoiding what Akcin considers over-concentrated areas like São Paulo in Brazil.

Citing Colombia as an example, he points to the likes of Medellín and Barranquilla, where EdgeUno already has a PoP. The company is also planning to build its own AI-focused data centres in secondary markets where it makes sense. In creating this distributed edge infrastructure for the future, EdgeUno is placing an emphasis on quality rather than just price. “Our main focus areas are high levels of quality, availability, throughput and download speeds,” says Akcin. “We want to provide the infrastructure of choice for local Latin American companies that want to connect globally and for international companies that want to enter Latin America.”

Meanwhile, beyond simply boosting connectivity, EdgeUno is focusing on strengthening the entire ecosystem for high-quality access and content. To achieve this, it is forging tight partnerships with AI and cloud-GPU providers, global cloud platforms, telecoms operators, and content and streaming players, as well as enterprises expanding into Latin America.

Gaining inspiration

Akcin is excited about the next phase for EdgeUno and has been preparing to lead the company into the future. For one thing, he has undertaken executive courses at Harvard and Stanford in the past two years to aid himself in developing a creative, forward-thinking strategy blended with deep operational discipline.

He also has personal reasons and inspirations for wanting to make EdgeUno’s vision a reality. He has had a long affinity with the Americas, after initially moving from his home in Turkey to Puerto Rico in the early 2000s and working with a university professor who helped bring internet to parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2018, after a series of roles in network engineering, planning and advising at major companies in the US, he had gone to Colombia for a surgical procedure to halt the progress of an eyesight-threatening condition. “Latin America gave me my sight, after Puerto Rico had earlier given me an opportunity to learn and educate myself,” says Akcin. “I wanted to give something back.”

EdgeUno was the result, with Akcin having long been aware of the major challenges faced by the Americas in providing connectivity and wanting to help fulfil a vision that every individual deserves an outstanding online experience. Though there is still much to do and EdgeUno is far from finished with its work, that wish is starting to come to light today. “Few providers in Latin America offer the joint breadth of data centre locations, fibre, connectivity and edge compute that EdgeUno does,” says Akcin.

And he expects this infrastructure to become ever more valuable as the company ramps up its edge-based AI strategy, with the next decade for EdgeUno being defined by smarter infrastructure, faster expansion and AI-driven modernisation of Latin America’s digital backbone. “Latin America has waited long enough,” says Akcin. “We’re now building the platform that will carry the region into its AI future.”