Africa Must Build the Cloud Sooner Than Later

There was a time data centres were seen as buildings at the edge of cities: secure, redundant, cold and invisible. The unseen machinery of the digital economy.

That time is over.

Data centres are no longer just technology facilities. They are strategic assets, energy platforms, sovereignty assets and national-resilience infrastructure. In a world of AI acceleration, geopolitical tension, cyber warfare, undersea cable fragility and physical attacks on infrastructure, the cloud now has a very real address.

Recent events should concern every African policymaker, regulator, investor, board member and technology leader. In March 2026, AWS Services reported a temporary power shutdown and fire at a UAE data centre after unidentified objects struck the facility during a period of heightened regional tensions. The Guardian also reported that commercial data centres in the UAE and Bahrain had become targets in conflict, signaling a new frontier in asymmetric warfare.

The lesson is clear: the digital economy is not floating in the sky. It is grounded in buildings, power systems, fibre routes, cooling plants, physical security, legal jurisdictions and political geography.

For Africa, this is not an academic debate. We already know what infrastructure dependency feels like. In March 2024, a suspected undersea rock slide off Côte d’Ivoire damaged multiple West African submarine cables, including ACE, SAT-3, WACS and MainOne. The Internet Society reported that 13 African countries were directly impacted, experiencing degraded services or near-total internet outages. Reuters also reported that the disruption affected internet services across West and Central Africa, with MainOne indicating that seabed seismic activity was a likely cause.

These were not theoretical network events. Banks slowed down. Digital channels suffered. Cloud services experienced latency. Businesses lost productivity. Customers felt the pain. The digital economy was reminded that “the internet” is only as resilient as the physical routes, exchange points, data centres and cloud regions that support it.

Africa cannot build its digital future on infrastructure that is permanently somewhere else.

This conviction has been years in the making.

My view on cloud and data centres in Africa is not new. It has been shaped over many years across banking, financial services and telecommunications, sectors where resilience, trust, scale and customer experience are not optional.

As far back as 2016, during my time at Commercial Bank of Africa (now NCBA), I had already declared myself a cloud-first CIO. At the time, many technology leaders still took comfort in seeing boxes of equipment (servers, storage, network devices, racks) arrive at the loading bay as visible proof of progress. I was no longer excited by boxes. I was excited by capability: agility, resilience, scalable infrastructure that could support innovation and customer growth, and technology teams spending less time managing hardware and more time creating business value.

That conviction was later captured when I was featured on the cover of a regional technology magazine under the theme, Exploiting new cloud technologies at Commercial Bank of Africa. Cloud was still approached cautiously by many African institutions at the time, especially in banking, yet even then, the direction was clear to me: cloud was not simply a hosting decision. It was a strategic capability for agility, resilience, innovation and scale.

That belief became even more practical when I later reflected publicly on a major data centre power incident at CBA Centre. The lesson was simple but profound: technology leaders should not spend their time fighting preventable infrastructure failures. They should be focused on customer value, platform resilience, digital innovation and business growth. That experience accelerated my conviction around proper data centre strategy, colocation, redundancy and infrastructure resilience.

At HF Group, that conviction evolved into a broader transformation agenda: not technology for its own sake, but how digital capability could change operating models, customer experience, agility and business performance. It reinforced an important lesson: digital transformation cannot outpace the people, culture and execution capacity meant to deliver it.

At Safaricom, the argument expanded into digital engineering, platform thinking and ecosystem capacity. Kenya’s ambition to become the Silicon Savannah would not be achieved without a strong software engineering community. When leading African companies train engineers, they are not only building talent for one organisation, but capability for the whole ecosystem.

That is why I see cloud and data centres not merely as infrastructure projects. They are the physical foundation of Africa’s digital sovereignty. Without them, our AI ambitions, digital banks, fintech platforms, health systems, government services, cybersecurity operations, research institutions and innovation ecosystems will continue to depend too heavily on infrastructure built, powered, governed and secured elsewhere.

Africa should not only consume the cloud. Africa must build the cloud.

The Cloud Has A Physical Address

For many years, the language of cloud computing created the illusion of abstraction. We spoke of “moving to the cloud” as if data disappeared into a neutral, borderless, weightless environment. Every transaction, AI model, payment instruction, health record, identity system, government platform, streaming service and digital bank, however, ultimately sits on physical infrastructure: servers, fibre, power, cooling, security, land, water, engineering talent and regulatory jurisdiction.

When that infrastructure is located far away, Africa carries structural risk.

This is not an argument for digital isolation. Africa needs global hyperscalers, international connectivity, subsea cables, satellite networks, global capital, regional interconnection and trusted international technology partnerships. Dependency, however, is not strategy. A resilient African digital economy requires the ability to host, process, secure, recover and scale critical workloads within our own markets and regions: African cloud regions, local and regional data centres, sovereign cloud capabilities, edge infrastructure, disaster recovery zones and AI compute clusters.

Digital sovereignty does not mean disconnecting from the world. It means participating in the world from a position of capability.

Africa’s Digital Infrastructure Needs A Home

Africa’s digital infrastructure is expanding rapidly: digital banks, mobile money platforms, national identity systems, health information platforms, government portals, e-commerce ecosystems, logistics platforms, content platforms, cybersecurity operations centres, data lakes, AI models and enterprise systems.

All of this needs a home.

The question is whether that home will be in Africa, or whether African data, transactions, AI workloads and digital value will keep travelling thousands of kilometres before they are processed, secured, stored or monetised. This matters for performance, latency, compliance, cost, privacy, national resilience and economic value retention. A continent that generates data but does not host, govern, process or monetise it will remain at the lower end of the digital value chain.

The next phase of Africa’s digital economy cannot be built only on apps. It must be built on infrastructure.

The AI Era Makes This Urgent

AI has changed the cloud conversation. Cloud is no longer just about hosting websites, email, enterprise systems, storage and digital channels; it is now the foundation for training, fine-tuning and deploying AI models. AI requires compute. Compute requires data centres. Data centres require energy. Energy requires policy. Policy requires leadership.

This is why cloud and data centre strategy can no longer sit only in the technology department. It is now a boardroom conversation, a cabinet conversation, an investment conversation, a national security conversation and an industrial policy conversation.

Recent research on AI infrastructure concentration projects that more than 90 per cent of new AI compute capacity will be concentrated in North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, while electricity consumption by six leading firms could rise from about 118 TWh in 2024 to between 239 TWh and 295 TWh by 2030. This should concern Africa. If AI compute remains concentrated outside the continent, African institutions will face higher costs, higher latency, weaker sovereignty and reduced ability to build models trained on African realities.

Our languages, cultures, legal systems, financial behaviours, disease patterns, agricultural conditions, customer behaviours and public-service needs are not always well represented in models trained elsewhere. Africa cannot simply wait for the world to build AI infrastructure and hope our context will be included later.

We need African compute for African intelligence.

Africa’s young population will generate the next wave of digital demand. The continent is not a marginal market. It is one of the central growth stories of the 21st century. The World Bank has noted that Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is projected to grow from about 1.5 billion in 2024 to 2.5 billion by 2050, with more than 600 million people joining the working-age population. It also projects that by 2050, one in three people aged 15 to 34 globally will be African.

This is a profound digital infrastructure signal. A young population is a digital population: one that will learn, bank, trade, work, build, create and entertain online, and increasingly innovate with AI. Africa’s youth will generate data at a scale the continent has never seen before. If that data is processed elsewhere, monetised elsewhere and used to train models elsewhere, however, Africa will once again become a consumer of infrastructure rather than an owner of value.

The demographic dividend will not automatically become an economic dividend. It must be enabled by power, broadband, cloud, data platforms, identity systems, payments, cybersecurity, AI, skills and local innovation ecosystems. Africa’s young people should not only be users of global platforms. They should be builders of African and global platforms. Africa has the energy advantage: if we organise it properly.

The global data centre race is increasingly an energy race. AI workloads consume enormous power, and hyperscale data centres need reliable, affordable, predictable and increasingly clean energy. In many developed markets, data centre growth is running into grid constraints, power availability challenges, water concerns, land-use debates and community resistance. Africa has challenges of its own: uneven grid reliability, weak transmission infrastructure in many markets, and lingering policy uncertainty.

Africa also has something the world increasingly needs, though: abundant energy potential.

The International Energy Agency has stated that Africa has 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources but only around 1 per cent of installed solar PV capacity. That is not just an energy gap. It is a digital infrastructure opportunity. Kenya provides a powerful example of both the promise and the caution. The country has significant geothermal potential, and geothermal is especially attractive for data centres because it can provide stable baseload power, unlike solar and wind, which require storage and grid balancing.

The EcoCloud-G42 geothermal-powered data centre was initially announced with an ambition to start at 100 MW and potentially scale to 1 GW. The project has since reportedly stalled or been suspended because of power-capacity constraints: Data Center Dynamics reported that President William Ruto said the proposed 1 GW facility would require roughly a third of Kenya’s current 3 GW supply, while ThinkGeoEnergy reported that the project was suspended because its power requirement would consume a disproportionate share of the country’s available electricity capacity.

That does not weaken the case for African data centres. It strengthens it.

The lesson is not that Africa should avoid hyperscale digital infrastructure. It is that data centres, cloud regions and AI compute facilities must be planned as part of national infrastructure strategy, not as isolated technology announcements. Cloud ambition must be matched by generation capacity, grid investment, transmission planning, tariff design and clear prioritisation between industrial, household and digital-economy demand.

The opportunity will not look identical across the continent. Some markets have solar advantage, others wind corridors, hydro, or geothermal. Africa also has oil and natural gas resources that can power industrial-scale infrastructure where renewables alone cannot yet provide stability. The answer should not be ideological; it should be pragmatic, sustainable and bankable. The winning model will be hybrid: solar where solar is strongest, wind where viable, geothermal where it exists, hydro where dependable, gas where needed for transition and resilience, and storage where economics allow. Digital infrastructure strategy and energy strategy must now be joined at the hip.

Data centres must be built with communities, not against them

Africa must also learn from the rest of the world. Communities in the United States, India, Europe and Latin America are increasingly debating the impact of data centres: power demand, water use, noise, land consumption, transmission lines, tax incentives and local benefits. This should not be dismissed as resistance to progress. It is a reminder that data centres are physical infrastructure with local consequences.

Africa must not repeat avoidable mistakes. Our data centre strategy must be community-aligned from the start: transparent environmental assessments, credible water strategies, renewable-energy integration, local jobs, local engineering development, community benefit frameworks and honest engagement with host cities, counties and regions. A data centre should not be viewed as a foreign machine dropped into an African community. It should become part of a broader local economic zone: power, fibre, skills, security, innovation, research, startups, universities, digital public infrastructure and enterprise digitisation. If we get this right, African data centres can become anchors of local economic development.

The World Is Already Moving

Africa should not wait. The rest of the world understands that cloud, AI and data infrastructure are strategic. The US continues to attract massive AI infrastructure investment even as grid constraints grow. Europe is debating sovereign cloud and digital autonomy. The Gulf is positioning itself as an AI and data centre hub. India is expanding its own data centre capacity to support digital services, cloud demand and AI.

Africa is also beginning to attract more serious investment. Reuters reported that IFC invested $100 million in Raxio Group to support African data centre development, noting that Africa still has less than 1 per cent of global data centre capacity even as mobile data usage on the continent is growing rapidly. Visa has also opened its first African data centre in Johannesburg, with Reuters reporting that the move supports its broader Africa investment and strengthens local processing and financial sovereignty. These are important signals, though they are not enough.

Africa should not only be a location for other people’s infrastructure strategies. We need African capital, policy, engineering, operators and ownership to participate meaningfully in this opportunity. The question is not whether global companies will build data centres in Africa. They will. The bigger question is whether African institutions will help shape, own, govern, power, operate and benefit from this infrastructure.

The Business Case Is Bigger Than Hosting

Data centres are not just buildings. They are economic platforms.

A serious African cloud and data centre ecosystem would support digital banking, fintech, e-commerce, digital identity, health tech, agritech, public-sector platforms, AI development, cybersecurity operations, disaster recovery, content delivery, gaming, digital media, research computing and industrial automation.

It would reduce latency, improve resilience, support regulatory compliance and keep more value in African economies. It would create high-skill jobs in engineering, cybersecurity, facilities management, power systems, network operations, cloud architecture, data engineering, AI operations and site reliability engineering, while supporting Africa’s ambition to move from raw data generation to data value creation.

Today, too much African data travels outward before value is created. In the future, more African data should be processed, secured, governed and monetised within African digital ecosystems.

Cloud and data centres are therefore not just technology investments. They are industrial investments, financial-sector investments, education investments, health-sector investments, AI investments and sovereignty investments.

What Africa Must Do Now

Africa needs a deliberate continental digital infrastructure agenda.

First, governments must treat cloud and data centres as critical national infrastructure, with clear policy on data sovereignty, cloud adoption, cybersecurity, tax incentives, land, energy access, water use, cross-border data flows and critical infrastructure protection.

Second, energy and digital policy must converge. We cannot plan data centres without planning power. Every serious data centre strategy should come with a power strategy: grid connection, renewable power purchase agreements, gas transition options, storage, backup, wheeling frameworks and long-term tariff certainty.

Third, African capital must participate. Pension funds, infrastructure funds, sovereign funds, banks, telcos, energy companies and development finance institutions should see digital infrastructure as an investable asset class. The economics of data centres are long-term, infrastructure-like and increasingly strategic.

Fourth, we need regional cloud zones, not only national silos. Africa’s markets are fragmented, and regional hubs can serve multiple countries if supported by smart regulation, resilient connectivity and trusted data governance.

Fifth, we need local engineering capability. A data centre without African engineers is only a building. A cloud region without African cloud architects, cybersecurity analysts, SREs, data engineers, AI specialists and facilities engineers is dependency in another form.

Sixth, we must build for resilience. Subsea cables will fail. Power grids will be stressed. Cyberattacks will grow. Physical infrastructure may become a target. Geopolitical shocks will continue. The architecture of Africa’s digital future must assume disruption and engineer for continuity.

This is Africa’s infrastructure moment.

In the past, nations competed on ports, railways, roads, oil, minerals and manufacturing capacity. Those still matter, yet in the digital age, nations will also compete on compute, cloud, data, energy, AI and digital trust.

The countries that host the infrastructure of intelligence will shape the economics of intelligence. Africa has the population. Africa has the demand. Africa has the renewable-energy potential. Africa has natural resources. Africa has entrepreneurs. Africa has young engineers. Africa has the urgency.What we now need is execution at scale.

We must stop thinking of data centres as back-end technology assets. They are the factories of the digital economy. They are the vaults of national data. They are the engines of AI. They are the control rooms of modern banking, commerce, logistics, healthcare, education, government and security.

The future will not be kind to countries that outsource the foundations of their digital sovereignty.

I declared myself cloud-first years ago because I believed then, and I believe even more strongly now, that Africa’s technology leaders must look beyond boxes, racks and hardware ownership. We must focus on capability, resilience, speed, sovereignty and value. Africa should not simply consume the cloud. Africa must build the cloud. This time, the infrastructure of the next global economy must have an African address.