Public Peering Remains Important in the Hyperscale Era

Internet Society Pulse | July 7, 2026

In short:

• Despite massive investments by hyperscalers and CDNs into private backbone infrastructure, public Internet Exchanges (IXPs) remain a vital mechanism for traffic localization, reducing latency, and efficiently reaching local "eyeball" networks.

• Based on deployed public peering port capacity, Akamai leads globally with 79 Tbps across 248 exchanges, followed closely by Meta (69.4 Tbps) and Amazon (51.2 Tbps). Meanwhile, Cloudflare stands out as the most broadly distributed network, participating in 352 unique exchanges.

• The global interconnection fabric is no longer dominated solely by Western markets; the Asia-Pacific region holds the highest number of top-30 exchanges (11), and Brazil heavily dominates South America with three exchanges in the global top six.

The distribution of CDN, cloud, and content provider capacity across Internet Exchanges (IXPs) provides a fascinating lens into the physical infrastructure of the Internet and public peering.

While hyperscalers and CDNs increasingly deploy private backbone infrastructure, public peering remains a critical mechanism for regional traffic distribution, cache efficiency, eyeball reach, and resilience.

This study aggregates the port capacity of ten of the most IXP-interconnected CDN, cloud, and content networks and ranks IXPs by total capacity. This ranking provides insights into the choices made by the networks, on an individual basis,, but also collectively as a group of CDN, cloud, and content providers with significant influence in the global interconnection ecosystem. The networks covered are Akamai, Meta, Amazon, Hurricane Electric, Cloudflare, Fastly, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and ByteDance.

The limitations of this analysis are obvious: presence at exchanges could be incorrect, or port capacity could be out of date, for instance. However, most of the networks under analysis depend heavily on PeeringDB automation. This gives the report a relatively high level of confidence.

Public Peering Remains a Critical Component of the Internet's Architecture

The data highlights the enormous scale at which major CDNs, cloud providers, and content providers participate in public Internet exchange ecosystems globally. Sourced from PeeringDB, Table 1 ranks networks by the largest deployed port capacity at IXPs, illustrating how deeply integrated these operators are within the global Internet infrastructure. It also shows the number of exchanges they participate in (IX count) and the number of ports (Port count).

See the data and read the entire report here.