Côte d’Ivoire To Build Its First State-Owned Data Centre

Côte d’Ivoire is set to open its first state-owned data centre, marking a shift from a market that, until now, has been built entirely by private operators.

The government is building a National Data Centre inside the VITIB (Village of Information Technologies and Biotechnology) free zone in Grand-Bassam, a coastal town near Abidjan. The facility is reported to be on track to open next year, with financial backing from the US Export-Import Bank (EXIM), as Côte d’Ivoire works to modernise public services, tighten cybersecurity, and gain more control over its own digital assets. The project sits inside a $209 billion national development plan for 2025-2030 that names digital infrastructure as one of the country’s main growth levers.

The data center itself will offer 1.73MW of IT capacity (3MW total power capacity), with 228 racks and 10 petabytes of storage.

The facility is being delivered by Cybastion, a Washington-based infrastructure firm, working with the Ivorian construction partner Porteo Group and a wider technology bench that has included Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Schneider Electric. EXIM approved a $66.1 million guarantee for the data centre in August 2025, its first data centre transaction anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, filed under the agency’s China and Transformational Exports Program. That guarantee sits inside a larger $170 million EXIM-backed package that also covers a government digitisation platform and a border surveillance system.  

The timing isn’t accidental. Côte d’Ivoire’s own digital ministry first framed a national data centre as a sovereignty project back in a May 2024 report, and the two governments signed the first memoranda of understanding for a backup data centre and a “digital administrative city” in June 2023, with the foundation stone laid that December. What’s changed since then is the money and the urgency: EXIM’s guarantee arrived in August 2025, construction had passed the 20 percent mark by December 2025, and the government has spent 2026 tying the data centre into a broader digitalisation agenda, including a planned “digital compact” with the World Bank and a financing roundtable set for December.

There’s also a regional current pulling in the same direction. Governments across the continent have spent the past two years treating data infrastructure as a sovereignty question rather than a purely commercial one. Gabon inaugurated its own first sovereign, Tier III-certified data centre in Nkok on July 3, 2026, built to host government, banking, and telecom data inside its borders, notable because Gabon had no data centres at all before that opening. Senegal has reportedly been accelerating a sovereign cloud project built with Alibaba Cloud, partly to secure systems for the Dakar Youth Olympic Games this October and November.  

Rwanda built its national data centre years earlier under the Smart Rwanda programme and now backs it with some of the continent’s strictest data residency rules.

Until now, Côte d’Ivoire’s data centre story has been a private-sector one. Equinix, Paix Data Centres, and Stellarix have operated in Abidjan for years. Raxio Group opened the country’s first Tier III-certified, carrier-neutral facility, Raxio CIV1, in Abidjan in September 2024.

A year later, ST Digital-a pan-African cloud services and tech provider-inaugurated its own Tier III facility in the same VITIB zone where the state centre is now rising, with CEO Anthony Same arguing that having local infrastructure is essential to protect our data amid rising cyberattacks.  

While regional infrastructure is expanding, Côte d’Ivoire’s private digital footprint remains modest. The country currently hosts just four to six operational data centers, primarily localized within Abidjan. This is a sharp contrast to the continent’s major digital hubs; mid-2025 data records South Africa leading with 56 facilities, followed by Kenya at 19 and Nigeria at 17, while more recent figures place Egypt at 14, and Senegal and Ghana at seven each.