Africa Data Centres (ADC), owned by Cassava Technologies, is on a $500 million growth push that would see the company develop a presence across North and Southern Africa.

Despite being Africa's largest network of interconnected, carrier and cloud-neutral data center facilities, ADC seeks to gain a competitive advantage against global companies coming on the continent.

In an interview with ITWeb this week, Dr Angus Hay, ADC's regional executive, says "data centres are capital intensive as a business."

He continues: “At the moment we have a capital plan in progress, you can see from the expansion we are doing, the construction in Cape Town and the building in Samrand. That is all being funded from a large capital pool of $500 million, and that is a combination of debt and equity within the larger Cassava Technologies group.”

Hay tells ITWeb growth plans are in motion and the company has identified opportunities from Morocco through to Cape Town.

Dr Angus Hay, regional executive of Africa Data Centres. (Pic: Lesley Moyo)

He explains: “We have expansion plans; we recently acquired land in Cape Town much closer to our landing cable. That is a facility we will start building soon. It will rival the Samrand as being a true hyperscaler 20MW facility.

“We have also bought land in Ghana and Morocco, as Accra and Casablanca will be joining the list of our data centres across the continent.”

According to Hay, the ADC is monitoring Côte d'Ivoire, Rwanda, Egypt, and Zambia for opportunities.

Hay describes the underlying drivers of data centres on the continent, stating that there are likely three causes, the most of which are driving growth in South Africa. South Africa's growth rates outpace those of the continent.

"The first of these is cloud, particularly public cloud deployments by hyperscalers, which are driving growth. The second trend is the shift to outsourcing to co-location providers, which is happening in a range of industries, including financial services, hotels, retail, healthcare, government, and major technology companies. All of these factors are driving demand for colocation providers.”

The third major trend is sustainability, as businesses outsource to entities that share their environmental and sustainable goals.