Africa
Challenges and opportunities for investing, building, powering, deploying and operating Digital Energy Hubs and Infrastructure to serve Africa’s 1.2bn population
Africa’s growing importance coincides with a global influx of capital to build digital infrastructure. Yet the continent’s infrastructure remains massively under-invested with reportedly less than 1 per cent of global data centre supply, outdated power systems, and scant terrestrial fibre.
South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt stand out as more advanced in terms of data center infrastructure development but fibre, dark fibre, new subsea cable systems and cable landing stations around the continent are driving new markets and opportunities.
Hyperscale is at a very early stage across the continent, but industry reports suggest that future demand will be driven by small and medium-sized enterprises, government agencies, data privacy laws, increased mobile deployment, use of fintech, video and gaming. Digital Africa is beginning to emerge, with an estimated 70% of African organisations estimated to move to the cloud by 2025.
Africa represents potentially the largest investment opportunity for data centers and Edge in the near term.
