Data centre leader expands into West Africa

A new 30MW data centre facility in Accra, Ghana, will make Africa Data Centres (ADC) the largest provider of such facilities in West Africa, adding to a presence in Nigeria and Togo.

Tesh Durvasula, CEO of ADC, says the Accra operation is a significant milestone and highlights the massive growth opportunity the company sees for its business in the region and the continent.

“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,” he says.

ADC is part of Cassava Technologies, which also houses Liquid Intelligent Technologies, a major pan-Africa fibre network provider. They are all part of the Econet group owned by Strive Masiyiwa.

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

Durvasula says: “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.”

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.

“Many exciting innovations have their home in Africa, and numerous startups 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 aligns with our expansion plans and is timeous as the government in Ghana has been introducing innovative and forward-thinking 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, we are continuously working to provide the infrastructure to reduce this digital divide. Being a business of Cassava Technologies, we intend to play a significant role in bringing to Ghana the necessary digital and infrastructure services required to support the mass adoption of digital services in the country and the wider continent.”