How the Cloud, the Edge and Interconnect Are Transforming African Data Center Market
African markets are witnessing an unprecedented wave of data center capacity build-out, driven by the awesome pressure to harness the explosive flows of data traffic sweeping the region, the gravity-like pull of physics and network latency, and the rising but no less powerful demands for national data sovereignty.
Africa’s commercial hosting capacity has surged and is now doubling every three years. This new report looks deep into the drivers of African hosting capacity growth, analyzes key questions facing the sector, from overbuild risk to true demand potential, likely hyperscaler destinations, edge strategies, sustainability in the face of power and water shortages and overall investor value.
This analysis lays out why data centers have become some of the most highly-valued assets in Africa’s digital infrastructure fabric. The reference research for all investors, data center providers and market participants in the growing African data center sector. This report includes a report in PDF format and key chart data in Excel.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
For much of the past decade, data centers were the weak link of Africa’s digital infrastructure buildout, a market segment too small and too insular to be meaningful. No longer. As broadband penetration continues to increase, African markets have witnessed an unprecedented wave of data center capacity buildout, driven by the awesome pressure to harness the explosive flows of data traffic sweeping the region, the gravity-like pull of physics and network latency, and the rising but no less powerful demands for national data sovereignty.
The African market is now in the midst of a seminal phase of construction activity. Around 70 new facilities have been built over the past five years, with 2022 the biggest year of construction to date. Africa’s commercial hosting capacity has surged and is now doubling every three years. Global investors are taking notice; Digital Realty and Equinix, the world’s largest data center colocations providers have entered the market with acquisitions, perhaps the clearest indication yet of the mainstreaming of African networks into global interconnected platforms.
Today, African data centers are some of the most highly-valued assets in the region’s digital infrastructure fabric. They are one of the most essential pillars of Africa’s emerging age of cloud, a phase of prodigious explosion in Internet traffic, cloud adoption, and integration of software into daily life and business operations.
The rise of the data center market has unleashed a new set of questions around overbuild risk, true demand potential, likely hyperscaler destinations, edge strategies, sustainability in the face of power and water shortages, and overall investor value.
This report explores all these questions, providing arguably the most in-depth view into the growth, economics and overall potential of Africa’s burgeoning data center industry.
Companies Mentioned
- Acronis
- Africa Data Centres
- Akamai
- Alibaba
- AMS-IX
- Asteroid
- AWS
- Canal+
- DE-CIX
- Digital Parks Africa
- Digital Realty
- Dimension Data
- Distributed Power Technologies
- Equinix
- Ethio Telecom
- GPX
- Huawei
- IBM
- Inq
- Inwi
- IXAfrica
- KasiCloud
- LINX
- Liquid Intelligent Technologies
- MainOne
- Maroc Telecom
- MaxCDN
- Microsoft
- MTN
- Multichoice
- N+One
- NTT Data
- Onix
- Open Access Data Centres
- Oracle
- Orange
- OVH
- PAIX
- Paratus
- Rack Centre
- Raxio
- ST Digital
- Stackpath
- Symantec
- Telecom Egypt
- Telkom/BCX
- Tencent
- Teraco
- Vantage Data Centers
- Vodacom
- Wingu
- WIOCC