‘Africa data centre operators to invest in digital infrastructure’

Leading data centre operators across Africa are investing massively in expanding their footprint to power the growth in data consumption and digital services fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

These investments will ensure that large enterprises delivering services across Africa and global Content Delivery Networks will be able to provide seamless and uninterrupted services to their subscribers without incurring the costs of building their own data centres.

This was revealed at the recently-concluded plenary session at the International Telecoms Week 2021, themed “Explore the growing Data Centre ecosystem in West Africa”, sponsored by MainOne. The panel, comprising of the leadership of leading data center businesses across the continent included the CEOs of MainOne, Funke Opeke, Ayotunde Coker of Rack Centre, Wouter van Hulten of Pan-African Internet Exchange Data Centres (PAIX), Stephane Duproz of Africa Data Centres and was moderated by Guy Zibi of Xalam Analytics, the leading analyst covering data centre developments on the continent.

The industry leaders highlighted the acceleration of investments in the digital infrastructure space in the region brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the gaps that existed in the market.

Of particular note was the fact that West Africa currently delivers less than 10 per cent of the total African data centre capacity and that Africa, which is home to about 17 per cent of the world’s population, has only 1 per cent of the global data centre capacity. This under-representation points to the fact that majority of data content consumed in Africa is hosted outside the continent and the market is severely underserved. The speakers agreed that the market was ripe for expansion given the increasing access to broadband and the rapid uptake of services by large enterprises.

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