AFRICLOUD connected its network to GigaPIX, Portugal’s national internet exchange, on 22 September 2026, adding another meeting point for African, European and Brazilian traffic in Lisbon. The cloud provider now exchanges traffic directly with nearly 900 networks, according to the routing data service bgp.tools.
GigaPIX sits alongside the exchanges AFRICLOUD already uses: NAPAfrica in Johannesburg, IXPN in Lagos, which it joined in July when it opened its Lagos region, DE-CIX in Lisbon and Madrid, and INTERIX.
Each Iberian exchange brings its own networks
GigaPIX is a neutral, non-profit exchange that began as the Portuguese Internet eXchange in October 1995, took its current name in 2001 and was a founding member of Euro-IX, the association of internet exchanges. It operates from sites in Lisbon and in Sines, on the Atlantic coast, and connects 63 networks.
The Iberian exchanges overlap without duplicating one another. DE-CIX Lisbon connects 64 networks and DE-CIX Madrid 229, and 27 of GigaPIX’s networks are on neither. Each brings a community the others don’t, which is why a network present on all of them reaches more than it would through any single exchange.
Twenty African networks across Iberia
The new presence on GigaPIX makes AFRICLOUD’s direct connection to some African networks more resilient. Across those exchanges, bgp.tools lists 20 networks registered in 15 African countries: 3 in Angola, 2 each in South Africa, Cabo Verde and Ghana, and one each in Eswatini, Mauritius, Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The largest group is the wholesale layer. Eight are carriers, 7 of them pan-African operators, and 2 of those own submarine cables. Six are access providers selling connectivity to homes and businesses, 1 is a content network, and public routing data does not show the type of the remaining 5.
Their spread supports connecting to each. Fifteen are on DE-CIX Lisbon, 10 on GigaPIX and 9 on DE-CIX Madrid, and 8 of the 20 are on only one of them. Just 2 are on all of them.
AFRICLOUD’s own routing data shows its Lisbon router taking routes from 16 of the 20 through these exchanges.
The pull towards Lisbon follows the cables. The Africa Coast to Europe system lands at Carcavelos, and a Lisbon data centre has announced direct links to Accra and Lagos. An exchange in the city is often the first place African and European networks meet without paying a carrier between them.
Brazil, by way of Iberia
Taken together, the same exchanges give AFRICLOUD most of its reach into Brazil. Its Lisbon router now has routes to 8,073 of the 8,735 Brazilian-registered networks in its routing table, 92%, covering 48,523 Brazilian prefixes, or 56% of those it holds.
AFRICLOUD takes routes directly from only 6 Brazilian networks at these exchanges. It reaches the rest through other members that carry Brazilian routes across the Atlantic, and no single exchange accounts for all of them.
That matters for a provider whose Lisbon region already serves South American customers alongside European and African ones. With Johannesburg and Lagos peering at home and Lisbon peering across 3 Iberian exchanges, AFRICLOUD’s network is being built around the points where African, European and South American traffic already meets.
Disclosure: AFRICLOUD is operated by the same ownership group as tech.africa.
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