Carrier hotel

A carrier hotel is a highly interconnected, carrier-neutral facility — often a converted multi-story building in a major metro's core — where dozens of telecom carriers, ISPs and enterprises physically meet to exchange traffic, typically anchored around a meet-me room. Classic examples include 60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas in New York and One Wilshire in Los Angeles, buildings that predate the modern colocation industry but remain critical interconnection hubs decades later. Unlike a purpose-built wholesale campus, a carrier hotel's value comes from carrier density rather than raw power capacity, making it a single point of convergence for a metro's fiber routes — and a single point of failure. An August 2026 power/mechanical failure at Minneapolis's 511 Building, a regional carrier hotel, knocked out telecom links feeding FAA air traffic control, 911 systems and election infrastructure across several US Midwest states, illustrating how one such facility can become critical infrastructure for an entire region.