Data-centre & digital-infrastructure coverage across Africa
Generation capacity and electrification underpinning always-on compute.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The pair announced a $1bn programme anchored on a geothermal-powered data centre campus at KenGen’s Olkaria fields, with a first phase of 100MW and an East Africa Azure cloud region to follow. It was the largest single compute commitment made to the market and set the expectation the 2026 power shortfall later collided with.
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