24 Feb Increasing demand for African data centres

South Africa will account for the bulk of the $5 billion investment expected to enter the Africa data centre market by 2026, according to Africa Data Centers. By the same time the country will also have secured an estimated $3.1 bn in investments.

The last few years has seen South Africa attract significant data centre infrastructure investments – including from big firms like Google, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft.

In fact, in 2019, Microsoft and Amazon became the first companies to use local data facilities to power South Africa’s public clouds.

The demand for data centres in the region has doubled since 2016, to reach more than 250 megaWatts – experts predict by the end of this decade the need will have grown to a further 1200mW.

The demand for public cloud facilities is increasing significantly, not least because the rapid digitalisation of Africa is producing tones of data. And South Africa is at the epicentre of this growth.

According to Cloudscene, South Africa hosts 55 of the continent’s 121 data centres.