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South AfricaThe City of Cape Town has cleared two hyperscale campuses drawing roughly 174MW combined, among the largest new individual loads on the African grid. The approvals land against McKinsey projections that continental installed capacity grows from about 0.4GW today to 1.5–2.2GW by 2030, needing an estimated $10–20bn of investment.
South AfricaSouth Africa hosts about 70% of Africa’s data centres and has drawn commitments from Microsoft and Amazon, with the market expected to roughly double to $5bn by 2031. Reuters reports the build-out is colliding with the country’s electricity and water constraints, raising the question of whether new load competes with households already exposed to outages and drought.
GabonST Digital opened a sovereign Tier III facility in the Nkok Special Economic Zone near Libreville, with about 1MW of power, 92 racks and capacity for roughly 3,000 servers, on an investment of 8bn CFA francs. Around 95% of data generated in Gabon has been hosted abroad, and the ICT ministry signed an MoU giving startups discounted access.
Airtel is putting $120m into a 38MW facility at Eko Atlantic, designed for AI compute rather than general cloud storage, and targeted to be operational by the end of 2026. It would be the largest data centre in Nigeria and the first of five hyperscale sites the group has flagged for Africa.
EgyptThree ministries are jointly building an investment map of sites suitable for large-scale facilities, leaning on a renewable build-out targeted to reach 45% of the energy mix within two years. The strategy is explicitly about becoming a regional hub rather than only serving domestic demand.
EgyptThe National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority granted Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure a licence to build and operate data centres and sell cloud services, with $400m committed to the first phase. It is the tenth such licence issued in two years, aimed at serving government and enterprise demand onshore.
SeychellesThe facility, inaugurated in Victoria, is built with redundant power, cooling and network paths and is pitched at regional clients needing secure hosting for cloud, financial and government workloads. For a market of under 100,000 people, the bet is that connectivity and stability, not domestic demand, are what fill the racks.
The State Department for ICT brought operators and cloud providers, iXAfrica, Digital Realty and Oracle among them, into a strategic forum on data centre expansion. The stated aim is a policy framework that positions Kenya as the continent’s digital hub and pulls in foreign investment in compute.
KenyaPresident William Ruto said the geothermal-powered campus planned with Microsoft and Abu Dhabi’s G42 would draw about a third of Kenya’s roughly 3,000MW of installed generation. His framing was blunt: switching the site on would mean switching off power for half the country, leaving the project unlikely to proceed as designed.
MoroccoThe Nexus AI Factory, backed by Nexus Core Systems, Nvidia, Naver and Lloyd Capital, will sit outside Casablanca and serve EMEA. It opens with 40MW of AI compute on Nvidia Blackwell GB200 hardware and is planned to reach 500MW on renewable supply from TAQA.
MoroccoOracle launched a public cloud region hosted by N+ONE Datacenters in Casablanca, the first full hyperscaler region in North Africa, with a second planned for Settat. It moves Morocco from "hyperscaler-adjacent" to hyperscaler-present, the shift that separates the top of this index on connectivity from the rest.
NigeriaNCC board chairman Idris Olorunnimbe and executive vice chairman Aminu Maida visited Airtel’s Lekki facility for a briefing on infrastructure and network expansion plans. Visits like this are the visible end of operator-regulator alignment, which is what decides how fast new capacity clears approval.
One email a month: the coverage above market by market, with the movements it drove in the readiness index.
