For years, the debate around Africa’s digital future has revolved around a single question: Who has access to the Internet? How many people are online? How many subsea cables are landing on its shores? How fast is the network expanding? These are legitimate questions – but they are no longer the right ones.
As someone working at the intersection of digital infrastructure and global connectivity, I believe we need to shift the conversation. The real constraint facing Africa today is not whether the continent is connected – it increasingly is – but how that connectivity is designed, routed, and optimised.
The numbers tell only half the story
Africa now has around 646 million Internet users, up from just 181 million in 2014, and penetration rates have reached approximately 43% continent-wide, with some regions, such as Southern and Northern Africa, already surpassing the global average (Data Reportal, 2025). Those are remarkable figures by any measure.
And yet, despite hosting 18% of the world’s population, Africa holds less than 1% of global data center capacity (World Economic Forum, April 2025). As of mid-2025, the continent had just 223 data centers across 38 countries, compared to more than 11,800 globally (African Energy Chamber, 2025). The math is stark: Africa is connecting fast, but it is not yet hosting or exchanging its own data at scale.
This creates a structural inefficiency with real economic consequences. A significant share of African Internet traffic still leaves the continent – often routed through London or Frankfurt – before returning to its destination.
Research from Chavula & Phokeer has shown that more than 75% of inter-university traffic in Africa follows these circuitous intercontinental routes, resulting in latencies more than double those of purely intra-African paths.
In practical terms, an email sent across a city in Nigeria or Kenya may travel thousands of kilometers offshore before reaching its recipient.
This is not just a technical inconvenience. It is an economic bottleneck.
The missing layer: interconnection, not just cables
Subsea cables have transformed Africa’s international bandwidth over the past decade. But cables alone do not create a functional digital ecosystem. What matters just as much – and what is too often overlooked – is interconnection: the ability for networks to exchange traffic directly, locally, and efficiently.
Internet Exchanges (IXs) are the infrastructure layer that makes this possible. They allow local traffic to stay local, enable direct connections to cloud and content providers, and reduce dependency on expensive international transit.
The progress made by IXs in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria illustrates what is achievable: NAPAfrica, Africa’s leading IX, surpassed 5 terabits per second of traffic in March 2025, a milestone that signals the scale these ecosystems can reach when properly supported (Intelligent CIO Africa, 2025).
But that level of interconnection remains the exception, not the rule. For most of the continent, the regional exchange ecosystem is still underdeveloped.
Capacity alone does not optimize performance. What truly improves latency, cost efficiency, and user experience is where and how networks interconnect. Africa, today, is connected but inefficient, and that gap is costing its economies dearly.
Why the AI era makes this urgency even greater
If the last decade was about getting people online, the next will be about the intensity of their Internet use, and artificial intelligence is the most powerful accelerant of that shift.
According to McKinsey’s 2025 research, global data center capacity demand is projected to nearly triple by 2030, reaching 219 gigawatts – with approximately 70% of that growth driven by AI workloads alone. AI inference workloads are growing at a 35% compound annual rate and are expected to overtake all non-AI traffic by 2029 (McKinsey, April 2025). These workloads move vast volumes of data, require ultra-low latency, and depend on real-time exchange between regions.
The question African governments and operators must ask is direct: Can the continent participate meaningfully in the AI economy if its connectivity remains indirect and inefficient? You cannot build AI-powered services, fintech platforms, or cloud-native businesses on a network architecture that routes your data through another continent before it returns to you.
Interconnection is not a technical nice-to-have. In the AI era, it is a critical architectural layer, as foundational as power or physical infrastructure.
Reframing the digital divide
The digital divide is usually framed as an access gap. But increasingly, the more relevant divide is architectural: Where data flows, how efficiently it moves, and who controls its exchange.
Africa does not lack connectivity potential. The subsea infrastructure is there. The demand is accelerating – Internet users are projected to surpass 1.1 billion by 2029 (Statista, 2025).
Investment is flowing in: The IFC committed $100 million in April 2025 to expand data center infrastructure across six African countries, in the largest digital-infrastructure investment the institution has made on the continent to date.
What Africa needs now is not more access but better architecture. Stronger regional IXs to anchor local traffic. Direct exchange corridors between African cities – Lagos to Nairobi, Johannesburg to Accra – without detouring through Europe. And deeper alignment with interconnection partners who operate on neutral, open, and scalable terms.
Where Southern Europe, and Portugal, fit into this picture
Geography still matters in the digital world, even though we talk about the Internet as borderless. And one of the most strategically important but underappreciated dynamics right now is the role that Southern Europe, and Portugal in particular, can play as a bridge between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Lisbon sits at the Atlantic edge of Europe, at the natural crossroads of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America. It is home to a growing density of subsea cable landings, carrier-neutral data centers, and interconnection platforms.
Portugal’s growing importance as a digital gateway is also reflected in Atlantic Convergence, taking place from 29 September to 1 October 2026 at Pátio da Galé in Lisbon. Bringing together stakeholders from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the event focuses on how AI, cloud, connectivity, and space technologies are reshaping digital infrastructure across the Atlantic region.
At its core is a question that is highly relevant for Africa as well: how to build sustainable, secure, and resilient digital infrastructure that supports future growth and strengthens digital cooperation across regions.
For African operators, this changes the routing equation: Instead of sending traffic through London or Frankfurt, networks can reach European interconnection infrastructure with meaningfully lower latency and reduced transit costs.
This matters for everyday users: faster cloud access, smoother video calls, and more reliable digital services. But it matters even more for the AI-driven applications that will define the next generation of African digital economies. Milliseconds of latency saved at scale translate directly into improved user experience, competitiveness, and cost.
Portugal is not positioning itself as a dominant hub that African networks must route through. The model is more useful than that: An efficient, accessible, and geographically logical bridge, where African, American and European networks can exchange traffic directly, on neutral terms.
The opportunity is here. So is the urgency.
The next phase of global digital development will not be decided by who is connected, but by who is connected efficiently. Africa is at a genuine inflection point. Demand is rising. Infrastructure is expanding.
Digital economies are accelerating. But without the right interconnection architecture, much of that potential will remain constrained, and the continent will continue to subsidize other regions’ network economics through expensive and inefficient transit.
The technology exists. The geography makes sense. The partnerships are forming. What is needed now is urgency and a willingness to treat interconnection not as an infrastructure detail, but as an economic strategy.
In the digital economy, distance is no longer measured in kilometers. It is measured in milliseconds. And for Africa, closing that gap is no longer a question of access – it is a question of architecture.
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