Hunter Newby and Connected Nation: Kansas Breaks Ground on First IXP

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Hunter Newby and Connected Nation: Kansas Breaks Ground on First IXP

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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...