DE-CIX and Ooredoo Oman announced on Tuesday they have signed an agreement to launch Gulf Gateway-IX, a new internet exchange (IX) that will interconnect the country’s dual subsea corridors in Muscat and Salalah.
Gulf Gateway-IX – which is scheduled to go live in early 2027 – will be designed as a unified, carrier-neutral interconnection architecture seamlessly connecting Muscat and Salalah under a single, synchronized national exchange fabric and operating as a single virtual exchange across Oman.
This will enable network operators, enterprises and content providers peering in Muscat to exchange traffic directly with peers connected in Salalah, and vice versa, via a single port and a unified peering policy.
Muscat serves as the primary northern gateway for Oman with major subsea cables landing from the GCC and Asia, while Salalah stands as the southern subsea landing point connecting directly to East Africa, Europe, and India.
Unifying both hubs allows networks to route around regional subsea disruptions seamlessly without needing international transit workarounds.
Gulf Gateway-IX will be housed in Ooredoo Oman’s data centres in Barka and in Salalah. The two sites, located approximately 1,000 km apart, will be directly interconnected with optimized latency, serving as an express corridor between the north and south of the country.
The new IX will also be accessible through Equinix’s MC1 data centre in Muscat and SN1 data centre in Salalah.
DE-CIX will manage the technical operations of Gulf Gateway-IX through its ‘DE-CIX as a Service’ programme.
Ooredoo Oman CEO Saoud Al Riyami said Gulf Gateway-IX will transform Oman into one unified digital hub by removing geographic disparities in connectivity, which in turn will drive inward investment for hyperscale data centres, edge computing, and AI infrastructure across the country.
“For our domestic enterprises, this fabric guarantees sovereign, ultra-low-latency connectivity essential to scale artificial intelligence, cloud workloads, and industrial automation across all governorates,” he said in a statement. “Regionally, it provides GCC and East African operators with a direct, high-capacity alternative to vulnerable maritime choke points. Globally, it cements the Sultanate as the premier, carrier-neutral transit nexus bridging Asia, Africa, and Europe, unlocking high-value foreign digital investment and accelerating our non-oil economic diversification under Oman Vision 2040.”
