Kathy Gibson reports – Africa’s time to shine on the digital stage is now.
That’s the word from Paula Cogan, MD of Digital Realty MEA, who points out that Africa accounts for 18% of the world’s population – with the majority of them being young.
At the same time, the continent is becoming more connected with a wealth of submarine and terrestrial cables being rolled out.
“It is a great place to invest in,” she says.
Lee Perrin, MEA director of CBRE, is a bit more cautious. “Sometimes it is hard to do business in Africa,” he explains. “It will happen: we just don’t know when.”
Striking a balance between the two opinions, Eben Owen, senior director of Uptime Institute Professional Services, says Africa is exciting but can be challenging.
What’s needed for the continent to grow its data centre footprint and connectivity, he adds, is the same level of investment as the rest of the world is seeing.
“And we need a different level of tenacity to push things through.”
Having said that, there are some interesting projects on the go, many of them challenging the status quo.
“And we are starting to retain and develop a lot of skills,” Owen says. “So overall it’s a good time to be part of the industry.”
New investments are mainly targeting undersea and fibre networks, Cogan says, with data centres still lagging.
“Only 2% of the world’s data centre capacity is in Africa, so there is huge untapped opportunity.”
With the deployment of cables, Africa is now connected and this has attracted investments from the hyperscalers – all of whom have a presence on the continent.
In addition, Digital Realty has invested in data centres in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and Mozambique with a commitment to invest more.
“Africa needs more data centres,” agrees Perrin.
These facilities should aim for areas of population density like Nigeria/Ghana where they could reach 400-million people.
Africa’s youth dividend cannot be ignore, Perrin adds. With 25% of all young children in Africa, the continent will continue to grow for years to come.
And Africans are resourceful: millions of small businesses are run from the owners’ phones, resulting in high traffic and data usage.
“If you want eyeballs and traffic, you can’t do better than you do here.”
Cogan concurs that mobile consumption growth in Africa is double what it is in the rest of the world.
And Owen points out that there are more AI startups in Africa than any other continent.
“So, in terms of investment, this is a great place to come,” Owen says. “The people are young, they are interested in pushing content, there are startups, and AI is being used.”
On the other side of the coin there are challenges, he says.
“There is a lot of interest at the moment in the AI potential, but there is still a big understanding gap in how to achieve that. There is a huge impact on the physical layer and mistakes will come from not understanding this fully. So capital will be wasted until we learn.
“But that opens doors for things like GPU as a service (GPUaaS),” he says.
Power and cooling are issues that data centres around the world are grappling with and it will be no different in Africa as operators roll out facilities.
“We need innovation in heat management,” Cogan says. While today’s facilities don’t yet require liquid cooling, she says any new builds should be planning for it in the future.
“We are designing to a principle whereby we can quickly and easily implement direct liquid cooling into existing assets.”
On the issue of Africa’s notoriously unreliable power supply, she points out that at least one data centre operator is investing in a solar plant with the aim of self-generating 100% of its power needs.
Perrin believes return on investment (ROI) in Africa is not going to be as quick as in the rest of the world.
“We need to have an African investment model where you may not see an ROI in four of five years. But the investors don’t want to hear that.”
Cogan adds that investments are subject to challenges like currency volatility which flows through the supply chain.
Navigating diverse and often-complicated local land use requirements is another stumbling block.
And skills remain a major issue. “We are constantly having to find new sources of talent,” she says.
But Africa might be missing the boat if it simply follows the trends from the rest of the world, according to Owen, who says the continent should look to hybrid data centres.
This would see the development of a few large data centres for raw processing power, and smaller data centres on the edge, close to where the people and use cases are.