The West Africa’s largest data centre is to be created by Rack Centre in $100m expansion.

Rack Centre, the leading carrier neutral data centre operator in West Africa, disclosed an expansion programme in its Lagos campus that will increase capacity to a total net lettable space of 6000 square metres, which will bring about 13MW of IT power capacity.

The expansion is expected to bring carrier neutral scale to West Africa, and this is in response to increasing demand for data centre space from cloud uptake, telecommunication investment and outsourcing of IT facilities by enterprises in the region.

Pan-African data centre platform, established by Actis and Convergence Partners, a leading ICT infrastructure investor in Africa will be funding this expansion with $250 million.

The platform is also actively developing additional buy and build opportunities across Africa, in addition to the expansion in Rack Centre, to establish a network of carrier neutral data centres aimed at catering to carrier, cloud and hyperscale customers.

Nigeria is a major entry point for global telecommunications, content, and cloud players seeking access to the region. Lack of cost-effective and energy-efficient IT infrastructure, has constituted a major constraints to doing business, in spite of the country’s potential with 138 million internet subscribers, more than any country in Africa or Europe, and the largest population and GDP in Africa.

Rack Centre brings global best practice to Nigeria, as the first carrier neutral data centre in the region, to achieve Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF), in a bid to create unrestricted connectivity between customers, telecommunication carriers, and internet exchange points within its data centres in the region, as a unique scale carrier neutral player.

The leaders that the platform has engaged globally include: Tim Parsonson, Co-founder, Teraco Data Environments – the largest carrier neutral operator in Africa, who joins the Board as Chairperson on the board. Frank Hassett, a veteran of the global data centre industry and previous Vice President of Infrastructure, at Equinix, brings over 1300MW of build and operate experience, to assist with hyperscale expansion.

The Chairman of Convergence Partners, Andile Ngcaba, while speaking on the expansion of capacity said, “Africa is at the start of a critical time in its development, as the 4th industrial revolution offers the chance to leapfrog many of Africa’s challenges, and harness the immense potential of its people. Convergence Partners is delighted to partner with Actis in accelerating the growth of high quality data centre infrastructure, an indispensable part of the foundation of this revolution in the region.”.

The managing Director of Rack Centre, stressed that “We are proud of the quality and scale bar we have set in the region and are scaling to be the de-facto digital data hub for West Africa”.

Coker said “Mass adoption of digital working models and content distribution is driving growing investment in the region and Rack Centre offers a world class location to house these IT and telecoms facilities,”.

Engineering Consultancy Arup, have been appointed for the project in a bid to support the ambition. Arub having designed over 2,000MW of IT capacity tech giants leading industry, and co-location providers across the globe, there leadership potential is unquestionable and uncontestable.