José Luis Gómez-Pardo is the CEO of NIXVAL, the leading carrier-neutral data center and Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Eastern Spain, and one of Europe's leading voices on neutral interconnection. He works at the convergence of regional IXPs, AI-ready edge infrastructure, and the transatlantic interconnection market linking Europe and the United States.
NIXVAL is one of only eight IXPs in Spain — and the only one outside the country's two primary metros — operating since 2008 with 1.2 MW of capacity, 40+ networks and ISPs on-net, ENS Alto certification and EN 50600 Class 4 design. Under his leadership the platform delivered a 2.5x capacity scale-up and adopted a“neutral-by-design” model that attracts Tier-1 carriers, cloud providers and regional ISPs. His operating thesis is consistent: power is the new compute, egress is the silent killer, and lock-in is the enemy of agility.
He argues that regional, neutral exchanges are becoming critical infrastructure for AI inference, network resilience and digital sovereignty — a thesis as relevant to the United States as to Europe. Deeply connected to the US interconnection ecosystem, he works across the Atlantic on how the American regional-IXP market will develop, and has led US infrastructure programs including the City of Houston's digital-twin deployment.
Gómez-Pardo is an expert contributor to the European Commission on cloud, AI and data-center performance policy (DG CNECT, 2025; DG Energy, 2026) and a member of the EPI DCOS committee. Over two decades he has held senior roles at Telefónica, Telefónica Tech and Sarenet — spanning BGP/MPLS network engineering, hyperscaler partnerships (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) and data-center commercial strategy. He is an Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Specialist, holds a BSc in Cyber Security & Networking (First Class Honours, UCLan), an award-winning MBA from ESIC, an MIT Leadership & Innovation certificate, and is a Spain-US Chamber of Commerce USA Market Specialist.
He keynotes across Europe, Eurasia and the United States — GRI Institute (New York), Data Center World, Data Center Eurasia, DCD Connect — was named the #1 LinkedIn creator in Spain for Cloud Computing & Data Centers, and is a member of Infrastructure Masons, IEEE and the British Computer Society.
