Airtel Africa To Venture Into Data Centre Business

Airtel Africa has ventured into the data centre business with the launch of Nxtra, founded on a commitment to meet the continent’s growing needs for trusted, and sustainable data centre capacity.

Nxtra aims to build one of the largest networks of data centres in Africa with high-capacity data centres in major cities located strategically across Airtel Africa’s footprint, complementing its existing edge sites.

Its ambition will allow it to serve the growing need of African enterprises and its data centre infrastructure will be designed to host the next generation of computing, while providing multi-MW capacity in a phased manner.

“A rapid increase in data centre capacity is needed to support the growth potential of Africa’s digital economy. We’re proud to drive the future of Africa’s digital infrastructure, unlocking opportunities for businesses to grow and fuelling economic prosperity,” Airtel Africa’s Group CEO, Segun Ogunsanya said.

Ogusanya added that Airtel Africa’s team has consistently shown its ability to deliver on infrastructure projects across the continent and that he’s confident that the next generation of data centres will support Nxtra’s ambition to become the partner of choice for global customers.

In a statement, Airtel Africa said that these facilities will meet stringent global security requirements and meet ‘five nines’ availability. Coupled with Airtel Africa’s extensive fibre footprint, Nxtra offers secure and scalable integrated solutions to global hyper-scalers, large African enterprises, startups, SMEs and governments.

Through locally available data centre capacity, speed to access digital services will improve and the cost of managing data will be reduced, thus helping power increased innovation, while supporting a new generation of African tech talent. Furthermore, Nxtra is enabling customers to meet data sovereignty requirements while at the same time enabling more local cloud services to be offered in the countries where Airtel Africa operates.

The first major Nxtra facility in Lagos, Nigeria, will deliver 34 MW of total power. It is designed to host high density racks and integrate the latest best practice construction to achieve 1.3 power usage effectiveness (PUE). It is expected to be live in mid-2025.

To deliver on Nxtra’s vision, Airtel Africa has appointed Yashnath Issur, the former head of Global Data Centre Portfolio Management at Amazon Web Services, as CEO of Nxtra by Airtel. Yashnath has 16 years of experience in the industry and has, over the past year, built a team of experts to execute on the strategy.