NAP of the Americas: The Complete Guide

“NAP” stands for network access point — a neutral place where independent networks meet and hand traffic to each other instead of paying a third party to carry it the long way around. The original NAPs were created in the 1990s as the commercial internet replaced the government-funded backbone. Most of that first generation has faded into history. The NAP of the Americas did the opposite: it grew into one of the most densely interconnected buildings in the United States.

Two things make it unusual. The first is carrier neutrality. No single telecom company controls who may enter, so more than 160 carriers, internet service providers, content networks and cloud platforms coexist inside and interconnect with each other directly. The second is geography. Miami is the natural landing zone for subsea cables running north from South America and the Caribbean, and the NAP sits at the point where those cables’ terrestrial backhaul converges.

Functionally the building does three jobs at once. It is an internet exchange, where networks peer. It is a carrier hotel, where cross connects between tenants are ordered as a routine service. And it is a colocation data center, where anyone can rent cabinets, cages or suites with power and cooling. Today it is listed and sold as Equinix MI1, though the older name is still what most people in the industry say out loud.

The facility was purpose-built and opened in 2001, developed by the Miami company Terremark Worldwide. That timing is worth pausing on: it opened as the dot-com collapse was wiping out comparable projects. What kept it alive was that it was not speculative floor space. It was designed from the start around a specific job — aggregating Latin American traffic in a neutral facility on US soil — and the carriers who needed that job done moved in.

Ownership has changed twice since. Verizon acquired Terremark in 2011, folding the NAP into its enterprise and cloud business. Verizon then sold its data center portfolio to Equinix in 2017 in a $3.6 billion transaction covering dozens of sites, and the NAP of the Americas became Equinix MI1. For tenants, joining the Equinix platform meant the building’s interconnection ecosystem was linked into a global footprint, with the same cross connect and cloud on-ramp products available in Miami as in Ashburn, London or São Paulo.

The name survived all of it, which tells you something about how the market thinks. Buildings get rebranded; the role a building plays in a region’s network topology does not change just because the logo on the door did.

For most of the internet’s history, two networks in Latin America wanting to exchange traffic with each other frequently did so by sending it to Miami and back. The regional peering fabric was thin, subsea capacity ran north-south rather than east-west, and Miami had the neutral meeting point. That pattern is called tromboning, and while regional exchanges in São Paulo, Bogotá and Santiago have reduced it considerably, Miami remains the default place where the hemisphere’s networks meet United States and global carriers.

The NAP’s subsea access is the concrete version of that story. Tenants can reach Brazilian markets through the Monet cable system and reach GlobeNet’s routes down the South American coast, alongside the broader set of cables that come ashore in South Florida and backhaul into downtown Miami. Pairing a subsea route with a cross connect inside the building is what turns a cable landing into usable connectivity.

The practical payoff is latency and cost. Serving users in Bogotá, Lima, Santiago or São Paulo from Miami is dramatically better than serving them from Virginia or California, and buying transit or peering in a building with 160+ networks is cheaper than buying it where you have one or two choices. If your traffic profile is Latin America-facing, this is the reason to be in Miami at all — and it applies to the wider market too, as covered on our Miami network services page.

The NAP of the Americas is a six-story structure of roughly 750,000 square feet — enormous by data center standards and the reason it is routinely described as one of the largest single-building facilities in the country. It was engineered for South Florida rather than adapted to it.

Per Equinix’s published specifications, the building sits 32 feet above sea level, which puts the raised floors well clear of storm surge, and it was designed to withstand Category 5 hurricane-level winds, with steel-reinforced concrete panels about seven inches thick. It is worth being precise here: that rating describes this building. Hurricane hardening in the Miami market varies considerably from site to site, so treat MI1’s numbers as MI1’s and check the published rating of any other facility you shortlist.

Inside, the tenant mix reflects the building’s role rather than its square footage. There is a dedicated federal floor for government workloads. The major cloud platforms are present, so private on-ramps to public cloud can be ordered as cross connects instead of routed over the public internet. And the density of carriers means that in most cases the network you need to reach is already in the building, a few hundred feet of fiber away.

The building is the right answer when interconnection is the point. Content and streaming platforms serving Latin American audiences, carriers and ISPs that need to peer with a hemisphere of networks, financial firms with latency-sensitive links south, SaaS companies opening a Latin American region, and government or defense workloads that need the federal environment all get something from MI1 they cannot easily assemble elsewhere in the market.

It is the wrong answer when interconnection is not the point. Downtown Miami real estate and premium interconnection carry a premium price. If you need thirty cabinets of general compute with ordinary internet transit, or you are chasing the lowest cost per kilowatt, other Miami-area facilities will serve you better for less. A common and sensible pattern is to split the two: a small network presence in MI1 for peering and cloud on-ramps, with bulk compute in a cheaper facility connected back by dark fiber or a metro wave.

Deciding between those paths is mostly a matter of comparing specifics — tier, power density, carrier count and cost — side by side. Our Miami data center comparison puts every facility we track on the same axes so the tradeoff is visible rather than assumed.

There are three routes in, and they differ mainly in commitment. The most direct is a colocation contract with Equinix for cabinets, a cage or a suite, which makes you a tenant with your own space and the ability to order cross connects to anyone else in the building. Terms typically run one to three years, and pricing depends far more on power draw than on floor area.

The second route is a reseller or partner. Managed service providers and network operators hold space in MI1 and sell smaller footprints, sometimes a partial cabinet, often bundled with remote hands, bandwidth and hardware management. For a first Miami presence this is usually faster and cheaper than contracting directly.

The third is to skip the floor space entirely and buy the connectivity. If what you actually want is reach into the building’s ecosystem, a virtual cross connect or a metro circuit from a nearby facility gets you the peering and cloud on-ramps without paying downtown colocation rates for the servers.

Whichever route fits, come to the conversation with your real requirements: power per cabinet, the specific networks and clouds you need to reach, redundancy expectations, compliance obligations, and how much you expect to grow. Those five answers determine both the quote and whether MI1 is genuinely the right building for you.