Stephane Duproz calls it ‘the magic moment’. It’s when a market reaches the pivotal point when large cloud providers are able to deploy their platforms locally, unlocking the vast potential of high-speed internet connectivity. As group executive director/SVP at Cassava Technologies, Duproz has seen these ‘magic’ moments as they’ve happened across the world. Now, he says, that moment is happening in Africa.

‘The magic moment happens when the local enterprise market is of a sufficient size that large cloud providers deploy their platforms locally, bringing large benefits in terms of latency and performance,’ he says, adding that ‘local’ is the key word here.

‘African enterprises already have access to cloud providers, except the content – the data – is not physically located in Africa. Then comes the moment when the customer wants to have their data closer to them. Now the cost of deploying a hyperscale platform like that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, so it has to be worth it – both for the provider and for the customer. When that happens, that’s the magic moment.’

Duproz calls it ‘magic’ because it triggers a snowball effect of digital development. First, businesses realise that having their IT infrastructure located on their own premises – perhaps in the basement, or in a server room at the end of a darkened corridor – is costly and not scalable, and that maintaining the infrastructure requires continual reinvestment. ‘At that moment, the cloud platform arrives, and the customer moves their IT infrastructure to the cloud and to the data centre where it physically is,’ he says. ‘Then their suppliers do the same, and their competitors, and their providers… And then it all starts to interconnect. That’s what’s happening in Africa right now.’

In late 2021 Africa Data Centres announced that it was embarking on the biggest data centre-expansion project the continent has ever seen, with plans to build a total of 10 interconnected data centres in the key markets of South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt.

The plan – which will more than double the company’s already significant footprint on the continent – represents an unprecedented US$500 million investment in Africa’s digital transformation.

This includes the expansion of its capacity in Johannesburg to 100 MW of IT load; together with the expansion of its hyperscale and enterprise-focused data centres at its existing campuses in Midrand and Samrand, as well as development at a third location in South Africa.

At the same time, the company opened a new 10 MW data centre facility in Lagos – the first of four facilities earmarked for Nigeria. These include an additional facility in Lagos (at a separate location to ensure full disaster backup), as well as Abuja and Port Harcourt.

Similar work is being done in Kenya, where Africa Data Centres is developing a second 20 MW data centre in Nairobi, with plans for a facility. This is part of the company’s US$200 million investment in Kenya, which will double the country’s data-centre capacity and cement Kenya’s role as an East African digital hub.

Further expansion is planned for the continent’s secondary markets, as Africa continues its unprecedented demand for fintech services, apps, broadband, cloud technologies and more. All of those, says Duproz, are seeing the demand for data – and data centres – skyrocket.

‘We never stop building,’ he says. ‘We’ve just built our new flagship, state-of-the-art data centre in Midrand; then there’s our facility in Cape Town; and we’re also in the first phase in Lagos. Then it’ll be Nairobi, then Johannesburg again…

‘As a business, we have been preparing for the moment when we’ll be building data centres in 10 different countries simultaneously. That scale of deployment would seem absolutely frightening if we hadn’t been working towards it for such a long time.’

Sub-Saharan Africa is due for an explosion in data-centre capacity. In 2021, the region had about 80 colocation data centres in 14 countries, compared to nearly 5 000 colocation data centres in 129 countries worldwide. Africa has a lot of catching up to do in terms of capacity – and Duproz believes the continent has the capability to do exactly that.

‘It remains important for hyperscalers to provide, as soon as possible, access to their platforms, wherever they are. There are various models of deployment,’ he says.

‘In addition to large cloud computing platforms typically housed in a large facility like Africa Data Centres, you could deploy a smaller platform in a secondary or tertiary market where you’re not going to deploy immediately. In this case, you would deploy network capacity that will enhance and improve performance, connecting the country where there is no platform to your closest data-centre location. And then the magic moment happens … or it doesn’t.’

Africa’s data-centre revolution does, however, have a skills challenge – although not of the type one might expect.

‘Africa does not lack skills,’ says Duproz. ‘Not at all. There are good, smart people all over this continent, but not all of them have years and years of experience in data-centre operation. So it’s not skills that are lacking, it’s experience. That is a challenge our industry is facing, and it’s why our company is securing and training a resilient workforce.

‘We identify people from underprivileged backgrounds and train them to participate in this growth sector, with the stable employment that the data-centre sector offers,’ he says. ‘Our strategy is all about empowering and uplifting Africa’s citizens, protecting the environment and uplifting the economy.’

For IT professionals across the continent – and for businesses that are ready to connect to hyperscale cloud services – these developments will sound tremendously promising. Magical, even.

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www.africadatacentres.com