Data-centre & digital-infrastructure coverage across Africa
Addressable market size and workforce readiness.
The 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.
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.
NigeriaKasi Cloud, backed by Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund, is building a $250m hyperscale campus in Lekki against a grid that has never sustained more than about 6GW for 230m people. Diesel backup puts operators near $0.40 to $0.50 per kWh where competing markets pay $0.05 to $0.10, which is the gap the 320MW national pipeline has to absorb.
South AfricaNational Treasury has elevated data centre infrastructure to the same strategic tier as electricity, ports and transport, and is examining incentives to support the build-out. Around 55 facilities are already operating, with more than R50bn of investment expected over three years as Microsoft, Google and AWS expand cloud and AI capacity in the country.
The two are planning a $250m facility at Maadi Technology Park with about 25MW of IT load, which would be the country’s first hyperscale-class site. It marks Gulf operator capital entering the Egyptian market directly rather than through a local reseller.
South AfricaCavaleros has plans for 360MW in Cape Town and 200MW north of Johannesburg, while Teraco is targeting 500MW in total, 290MW of it new in Johannesburg. Together the announced pipeline adds roughly 1,000MW to national demand, about one stage of load shedding, and points to a supply squeeze by 2029 unless generation grows with it.
KenyaiXAfrica will act as host partner for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region in Nairobi, the country’s first public cloud region. It sits on a 22MW hyperscale, carrier-neutral campus built for AI workloads and tied to renewable supply, which moves latency-sensitive workloads onshore for the first time.
MoroccoOperators have announced close to 2GW of Moroccan capacity, against a current continental footprint nearer 500MW, including Iozera’s $500m 386MW Tetouan site and Naver’s 500MW project. Proximity to Europe and subsea landings are the draw; generation and water availability are the constraints on actually building it.
L’Express argues the island’s AI ambitions need continuous baseload power that the current generation and transmission plan does not provide, and that ICT and energy policy are not being sequenced together. The risk it names is stranded assets: Tier IV capacity that cannot run at full load.
NigeriaLG3 is the opening phase of a roughly $100m two-year African programme, with the Lagos site slated to open in Q1 2026. Separately Rack Centre began hosting EdgeNext’s CDN and cloud services locally, shortening delivery routes for gaming, fintech and content workloads.
NamibiaICT minister Emma Theofelus announced a national data centre as core infrastructure under the National Digital Strategy 2025 to 2029, with the ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office finalising the concept note and project proposal. Specifications and capacity were not disclosed; the country sits 114th on the UN e-Government Development Index.
KenyaAirtel Africa’s data centre arm started work on a two-phase 44MW site outside Nairobi, ready for service in the first quarter of 2027. On completion it would pass iXAfrica’s 22.5MW facility as East Africa’s largest announced campus by installed power.
Work began at Nkok, 27km from Libreville, on a facility built with pan-African operator ST Digital to offer sovereign cloud to finance, healthcare and education. The stated aim was to keep regulated data inside national borders rather than in European or South African facilities.
MoroccoOracle set out an expansion of its research and development capability in Morocco, building toward a local engineering base of around 1,000 professionals. The hiring preceded the Casablanca cloud region by ten months and is the kind of skills anchoring that keeps a cloud investment from being purely a real-estate deal.
Cabo VerdeThe €51.85m park, financed largely by the African Development Bank, opened formally in May 2025 after operating since November 2023, and includes a data centre, a disaster recovery site and training facilities. It houses 23 companies from seven countries and 311 staff, with all 52 office units taken.
NigeriaEquinix, Kasi, Nxtra by Airtel and OADC are all building close to the eight subsea landing stations on Lagos Island, buying short routes to international capacity and access to cooling water. Nigerian capacity is expected to move from about 64MW to roughly 200MW by 2027, second on the continent behind Johannesburg.
NigeriaOpen Access Data Centres, part of WIOCC Group, set out a $240m multi-phase expansion of its Lagos facility to 24MW, the first 12MW due in 2026. The spend sits inside a wider $500m African build programme aimed at cloud, analytics and AI demand.
EgyptThe pan-African infrastructure investor took a 42.9% stake in Raya Data Center, alongside $10m from Raya Information Technology, to fund a greenfield Tier III site in Egypt. Raya already runs two Tier III facilities in Cairo, and construction on the new one was set to start in early 2025.
Teraco began construction of JB7, a 40MW critical-load facility on its Isando campus in Ekurhuleni, funded through an R8bn syndicated loan and due to open in 2026. It takes the campus to about 110MW and uses a zero-water cooling design, which matters in a market where the water constraint is as binding as the power one.
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