The digital geography of America is shifting, and in Wichita, Kansas, that shift just became tangible.

In a groundbreaking ceremony this spring, Connected Nation and Wichita State University launched construction on the state’s first carrier-neutral Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a modular facility designed to serve as the heart of regional interconnection. When completed, the site will create the lowest-latency, highest-resilience internet hub in Kansas, a future-forward interconnection point positioned to drive down costs, enhance performance, and unlock critical capabilities for cloud and AI services across the Midwest.

In this episode of The Data Center Frontier Show podcast, I sat down with two of the leaders behind this transformative project: Tom Ferree, Chairman and CEO of Connected Nation (CN), and Hunter Newby, co-founder of CNIXP and a veteran pioneer of neutral interconnection infrastructure. Together, they outlined how this facility in Wichita is more than a local improvement, it’s a national proof-of-concept.

“This is a foundation,” Ferree said. “We are literally bringing the internet to Wichita, and that has profound implications for performance, equity, and future participation in the digital economy.”

A Marriage of Mission and Know-How

The Wichita IXP is being developed by Connected Nation Internet Exchange Points, LLC (CNIXP), a joint venture between the nonprofit Connected Nation and Hunter Newby’s Newby Ventures. The project is supported by a $5 million state grant from Governor Laura Kelly’s broadband infrastructure package, with Wichita State providing a 40-year ground lease adjacent to its Innovation Campus.

For Ferree, this partnership represents a synthesis of purpose.

“Connected Nation has always been about closing the digital divide in all its forms, geographic, economic, and educational,” he explained. “What Hunter brings is two decades of experience in building and owning carrier-neutral interconnection facilities, from New York to Atlanta and beyond. Together, we’ve formed something that’s not only technically rigorous, but mission-aligned.”

“This isn’t just a building,” Ferree added. “It’s a gateway to economic empowerment for communities that have historically been left behind.”

Closing the Infrastructure Gap

Newby, who’s built and acquired more than two dozen interconnection facilities over the years, including 60 Hudson Street in New York and 56 Marietta Street in Atlanta, said Wichita represents a different kind of challenge: starting from scratch in a region with no existing IXP.

“There are still 14 states in the U.S. without an in-state Internet exchange,” he said. “Kansas was one of them. And Wichita, despite being the state’s largest city, had no neutral meetpoint. All their IP traffic was backhauled out to Kansas City, Missouri. That’s an architectural flaw, and it adds cost and latency.”

Newby described how his discovery process, poring over long-haul fiber maps, researching where neutral infrastructure did not exist, ultimately led him to connect with Ferree and the Connected Nation team.

“What Connected Nation was missing was neutral real estate for networks to meet,” he said. “What I was looking for was a way to apply what I know to rural and underserved areas. That’s how we came together.”

The AI Imperative: Localizing Latency

While IXPs have long played a key role in optimizing traffic exchange, their relevance has surged in the age of AI, particularly AI inference workloads, which require sub–3 millisecond round-trip delays to operate in real time.

Newby illustrated this with a high-stakes use case: fraud detection at major banks using AI models running on Nvidia Blackwell chips.

“These systems need to validate a transaction at the keystroke. If the latency is too high, if you’re routing traffic out of state to validate it, it doesn’t work. The fraud gets through. You can’t protect people.”

“It’s not just about faster Netflix anymore,” he said. “It’s about whether or not next-gen applications even function in a given place.”

In this light, the IXP becomes not just a cost-saver, but an enabler, a prerequisite for AI, cloud, telehealth, autonomous systems, and countless other latency-sensitive services to operate effectively in smaller markets.

From Terminology to Technology: What an IXP Is

Part of Newby’s mission has been helping communities, policymakers, and enterprise leaders understand what an IXP actually is. Too often, the industry’s terminology, “data center,” “meet-me room,” “carrier hotel”, obscures more than it clarifies.

“Outside major cities, if you say ‘carrier hotel,’ people think you’re in the dating business,” Newby quipped.

He broke it down simply: An Internet Exchange (IX) is the Ethernet switch that allows IP networks to directly peer via VLANs. An Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is the physical, neutral facility that houses the IX switch, along with all the supporting power, fiber, and cooling infrastructure needed to enable interconnection.

The Wichita facility will be modular, storm-hardened, and future-proofed. It will include a secured meet-me area for fiber patching, a UPS-backed power room, hot/cold aisle containment, and a neutral conference and staging space. And at its core will sit a DE-CIX Ethernet switch, linking Wichita into the world’s largest ecosystem of neutral exchanges.

“DE-CIX is the fourth partner in this,” said Newby. “Their reputation, their technical capacity, their customer base, it’s what elevates this IXP from a regional build-out to a globally connected platform.”

Public Dollars, Private Leverage

The Wichita IXP was made possible by public investment, but Ferree is quick to note that it’s the kind of public investment that unlocks private capital and ongoing economic impact.

“This is the Eisenhower moment for digital infrastructure,” he said, referencing both the interstate highway system and the Rural Electrification Act. “Without government’s catalytic role, these markets don’t emerge. But once the neutral facility is there, it invites networks, it invites cloud, it invites jobs.”

As states begin to activate federal funds from the $42.5 billion BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) program, Ferree believes more will follow Kansas’s lead, and they should.

“This isn’t just about broadband access,” he said. “It’s about building a digital economy in places that would otherwise be excluded from it. And that’s an existential issue for rural America.”

From Wichita to the Nation

Ferree closed the podcast with a forward-looking perspective: the Wichita IXP is just the beginning.

“We have 125 of these locations mapped across the U.S.,” he said. “And our partnerships with land-grant universities, state governments, and private operators are key to unlocking them.”

By pairing national mission with technical rigor, and public funding with local opportunity, the Wichita IXP is blazing a trail for other states and regions to follow.