Africa Data Centres Opens 10MW Colocation Facility in Lagos

Africa Data Centers (ADC), the continent’s largest data center operator, has opened the first phase of its 10MW facility in Lagos, Nigeria.

LOS1 will become the foundation for further expansion, with another three data centers planned for Nigeria, and at least six more for key African cities.

“We built this facility in response to the massive demand from hyperscalers, key cloud operators and multi-national enterprises that already use our facilities and have expressed interest in being a part of bringing digitization at scale to West Africa,” said Stephane Duproz, CEO of ADC.

Rapid expansion

ADC owns and operates nine carrier and cloud-neutral data centers across six countries – including locations in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Cape Town, Harare, and Kigali.

Earlier this month, it became part of Cassava Technologies, a new holding company focused on telecommunications that includes Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Africa Data Centres, Liquid Cloud, Sasai Fintech, Vaya Technologies, and Distributed Power Technologies.

“Our unmatched fiber broadband, data centers and renewable energy infrastructure, paired with fintech, cloud, cyber security, and on-demand digital platforms, will accelerate Africa’s digital transformation,” Hardy Pemhiwa, CEO of Cassava Technologies, said at the time.

ADC’s latest data center project is located in the special Economic Zone called Eko Atlantic City. The facility will feature six data halls with 6000m² of white space when fully built out.

It is the first of four data centers that ADC plans to build in Nigeria; it envisions another data center in Lagos for easy backup and disaster recovery, as well as further sites in Abuja and Port Harcourt.

In total, ADC expects to have at least 54MW of power capacity in operation by 2025.

“These plans are the greatest Africa has ever seen,” Duproz said. “They will see us build some ten interconnected, cloud- and carrier-neutral data centers across the length and breadth of the continent, in an unmatched $500m investment in Africa’ digital transformation, which will double our already significant investment in the continent.”

Just last week, Africa Data Centres announced it would expand its campus in Johannesburg to support 100MW of IT load. It also plans to expand data centers at existing campuses in Midrand and Samrand, and is securing land for another location in South Africa.

And one week prior, the company pledged to spend $200m on developing its second and third data centers in Nairobi, Kenya.