MDXi investment in Nigeria to hit N12.2bn

MDXi, a leading data centre in West Africa, has announced plans to inject fresh N2.5 billion investments to strengthen its operations in Nigeria, raising its investment stake from N10.7 billion in phase one to N12.2 billion in the current phase two. This fresh investment would enhance and raise its capacity in local data hosting from 300 to 600 racks.

The General Manager, MDXi, Mr Gbenga Adegbiji, who made the disclosure during a media tour of the MDXi Data Centre facilities in Lagos recently, said the need for expansion was based on customer’s demand, having occupied almost all the available space left in the existing 300 rack space that was built in 2015, during the first phase construction of its data centre located in Lekki axis of Lagos.

Adegbiji added that since 2015, when MDXi data centre was launched, the management had spent a total of $35 million, estimated at N10.7 billion, that the company has sunk into building capacity in the last five years to create a world class data service centre.

In a message to the Federal Government, he said the time has come for government to make stronger policies to ensure that private sector and organs of state host very important critical national data for security and economic reasons.

“Government must know the importance of data domestication in Nigeria. When data is hosted abroad, the outside world gets our data before us because they have access to it,” he said

He added that Nigerian Banks now know the value of local data hosting.

“Over 70 per cent of Nigerian Banks host data at MDXi and out of the 22 banks in Nigeria, 21 among them have something to do with MDXi data centre. MDXi expansion from 300 racks to 600 racks is as a result of increasing customer needs,” he stated.

Adegbiji said more than 70 perbvcent of current capacity of 300 racks is already occupied and the rest are already paid for.

“By march this year, our current capacity will be exhausted. That is why we have embarked on expansion for another 300 racks. In fact, some companies are already booking for space in the new space,” he said.

He admitted that data centre business is capital intensive, and therefore called on the Federal Government to support data centre operations in Nigeria. He said there was the need for proper regulation of data centre business in the country and called on government to declare data centre operation as critical national infrastructure that needs government attention because of the critical role it plays in the economy of any country.

Giving details of MDXi operations in Nigeria, Adegbiji said, “MDXi is West Africa’s largest full-scale data centre provider offering colocation, wholesale deployments, interconnection and cloud services. MDXi is the gold standard for data centre real estate in the region as it develops a data centre eco-system spanning facilities in Lagos, Sagamu, Accra and Code D’Ivoire and Senegal.”

According to Adegbiji, MDXi is best in class infrastructure, built to TIA 942 and Uptime Institute as serves as West Africa’s Tier III Standards, which as serves as West Africa’s Tier III facility with PCI DSS, ISO 27001 and 9001 certifications.

MDXi customers have direct access to all major telecom carrier and Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks in West Africa, multiple peering exchanges in Nigeria, Ghana, Amsterdam, and London, offering cloud services in addition to data hosting.

Speaking further on why Government must intervene, he explained that “60 per cent of all operation cost is power. Because of our peculiar environment, we use more power to evacuate heat from the sensitive areas of the data centre. We have extremes of temperature and humidity here and that cost reflect on the unit cost customers pay per rack,” he added.