Airtel Nigeria has set aside a multimillion dollar purse to build a data centre in response to growing data and connectivity demand.
Dinesh Balsingh, CEO of Airtel Nigeria, and Ogo Ofomata, Airtel business director, announced plans for the new hyperscale facility this week during a media event.
The facility would be located in Lagos and will have an initial IT load of 38 megawatts.
"We don't want to start small. We are building at the hyperscale level, designed for the new server loads that modern infrastructure demands," Ofomata remarked.
The Airtel move comes less than a month after its peer, MTN, Africa's largest telecom provider, also announced its intention to launch a $240 million data centre in Ikeja, Lago.
The MTN facility, named after the late MTN Group CEO Sifiso Dabengwa, is set to become Nigeria's largest pre-fabricated modular data centre, with 96 containerised modules and 1,500 racks.
The data center's power and cooling systems are totally modular and distributed across three floors, assuring efficiency and reliability, said the company.
In the case of Airtel, Balsingh noted that the facility is intended to house GPU servers, which require substantially more power and cooling than traditional CPU-based systems.
“Just take GPU servers, they’re ten times the size of CPU servers and deliver a hundred times the performance,” Balsingh said. He added that the facility is being built with a focus on artificial intelligence.
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