Article summary
- Airtel Business, through its Nxtra arm, plans to establish five data centers in Africa, expanding its presence in the continent’s data center ecosystem.
- Nxtra Data Centres, a joint venture between Airtel Business and Carlyle Group, has been operating in India with 12 data centers and 120 Edge facilities.
- The investment in African data centers is driven by the increasing demand for data services and internet penetration in the continent, despite economic challenges. Several companies, including Equinix, Google, Facebook, and Africa Data Centres, have also announced plans to enter the African data center market.
In a further boost to the African data center ecosystem, Airtel Business, under its Nxtra arm, has announced plans to set up five data centers within the continent.
So far, Nxtra Data Centres has operated exclusively in India – with 12 data centers and 120 Edge facilities or Points-of-Presence in its portfolio. Although Nxtra Data Centres will be newly introduced to the African continent, its parent company Airtel is one of the major telcos in the continent – operational in 14 countries. Here, Airtel operates 40 edge data centers utilized exclusively for their own captive use.
Nxtra Data Centres, founded in 2013, is a joint venture between Airtel Business and Carlyle Group in which the latter completed the acquisition of a 24% stake in Nxtra for $325 million last year. Regarded as one of the major data center operators in India, they have invested in two submarine cables to Africa, 2Africa and Equiano. Once set up, they plan to initiate operations and scale their business with hyper scale data centers within the continent.
RelatedStories
The visible rise in demand for data centers in Africa despite economic challenges
- Nxtra’s investment in the African market is driven by rapid internet penetration and the growth of internet users within the continent. This was expressed in a statement by the Airtel Global Business CEO, Vani Venkatesh, in which he said “Compared to even about three-to-five years back, there’s a multi-fold increase in the amount of data that’s being transferred.
- There are customers who want 99.99% uptime across the four diversity paths … So that’s a higher responsibility on us to make sure that the networks are upgraded and the delivery is robust. Everything is real-time and the lead time is reduced. There’s redundancy, there’s diversity. And there’s digitization so that it’s seamless and on-demand. We are scaling up dramatically to ensure we continue to meet the growing needs of our customers,” elaborates Venkatesh.
So far, in the past year, a spate of companies have announced or completed plans to enter the African market. Notably, Equinix’s $320 million acquisition of MainOne in 2022 marked its introduction to the continent. In addition, top technology companies including Google and Facebook also announced plans to set up a substation in Lagos and a cable landing station in Nigeria respectively. Finally, Africa Data Centres also announced its intention to commence construction of a new data center facility in Accra, Ghana thus expanding its footprint within the continent. Despite the recent investments into the niche sector, we believe that there’s room for more as we progress further into the digital age.
We love your feedback! Let us know what you think about Airtel’s Nxtra’s Planned Data Centre Facilities by sending an email to insights@estateintel.com.
Subscribe to ei Pro to access affordable real estate data such as; transaction comparables, sales rates, yields, supply drivers, and information on key real estate market participants who are active in the market.
Author: Bisi Adedun
