Africa Data Centres lifts veil on 30MW facility in Accra

Africa Data Centres, a carrier-neutral co-location data centre provider, has announced the building of a 30MW data centre facility in Accra, Ghana. This comes just six months after it secured an investment of nearly R4 billion investment to expand its two Johannesburg data centres to 100MW of IT load.

News of the new Accra facility was announced by Tesh Durvasula, chief executive of the Pan-African technology group. He says it lays the groundwork for the company’s hyper-scale partners to expand digital services and solutions to more countries in West Africa.

The latest move also makes Africa Data Centres the largest provider in West Africa, with facilities in Nigeria, Togo and now Ghana. The region holds massive growth opportunity, says Durvasula. “We are witnessing an unprecedented demand for digital services, apps, broadband, cloud technologies, and more, all of which are seeing data demand soar to unimagined levels.”

The 30MW facility in Accra will play a significant role in leading the charge for hyper-scale customers to deploy digitisation solutions to West Africa.

“This new facility will be a giant leap forward in our ambitious long-term plans to close the digital divide in Africa by bringing digital services to more businesses and people. We chose Accra as our next location since there is an existing high demand from hyper-scalers, cloud operators and multi-national enterprises to digitally transform West Africa,” Durvasula states.

In addition to bringing digital services, the data centre will create numerous job opportunities through the digitisation of the economy and hiring local contractors and workers for the builds, from entry to high-tech level.

Enhancing digital access

According to Durvasula many exciting innovations have their home in Africa.

“Numerous start-ups are raising billions to debut disruptive models across a wide range of sectors. Moreover, with Ghana being the second-largest economy in West Africa, it also is an attractive investment destination for international tech giants that want to expand their footprint in the region.”

Seamless connectivity is key to helping Ghanaian businesses and citizens reap the rewards of the digital disruptions happening across West Africa. However, the lack of necessary infrastructure has resulted in slower growth than the rest of the world.

Opening a data centre is said to align with the company’s expansion plans. This, as the government of Ghana has been introducing innovative digital projects over the last few years. Although there has been significant growth in the past fear years, many Ghanaian citizens remain without digital services.

As the largest network of interconnected, carrier- and cloud-neutral data centre facilities on the continent, Durvasula says Africa Data Centres continuously works to provide the infrastructure to reduce this digital divide.

Africa has never seen plans like this before, he says. “The Africa Data Centres team aims to build many interconnected, cloud- and carrier-neutral data centres across the length and breadth of the continent in an unrivalled $500 million investment in Africa’s digital transformation.”

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