Hard on the heels of Oracle’s planned entry into Africa, reported here earlier this week, there’s been another announcement relating to cloud services and data centres on the continent, this time from Vantage Data Centres, a global provider of hyperscale data centre campuses.
Vantage has announced that it has begun construction of its first African campus in South Africa, leveraging a $1 billion investment from existing financial partners. The 80MW campus will be in Johannesburg’s Waterfall City, a business and data centre ecosystem.
The carrier-neutral Johannesburg campus will consist of three facilities across 12 hectares with 60,000 square metres of data centre space once fully developed. The first phase of the campus, slated for completion in the summer of 2022, will include a 16MW building.
This marks Vantage’s entry into its fifth continent. In September it announced its expansion into the Asia-Pacific market through two acquisitions: Agile Data Centres and the data centre portfolio of PCCW Ltd.
Meanwhile Africa continues to attract growing interest from new and established players in the data centre business. Most recently MainOne’s subsidiary MDXi has announced plans to expand its Lekki Data Centre in Lagos, Nigeria. MDXi said the Lekki II facility will be deployed on “a very aggressive timeline” and will launch the new data centre in Q1 2022. The company said the new modular facility will be built to Tier III standards.
As with many such ventures nowadays, this one will emphasize sustainable construction practices such as offering renewable energy options, limiting carbon footprints and maintaining energy-efficient operations with an industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE).
MainOne is a broadband infrastructure company providing telecoms services and network solutions across West Africa. MDXi describes itself as West Africa’s leading commercial data centre and interconnection operator.
MDXi currently has 5MW of capacity across Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.
