Africa Digest News

By Thuita Gatero, Managing Editor, Africa Digest News. He specializes in conversations around data centers, AI, cloud infrastructure, and energy.

The last time someone built Africa a major infrastructure project at scale, it was not out of benevolence. The railways, the ports, the pipelines, they were laid down under duress, often against our own interests, and later weaponized to extract more from the continent than they gave back. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Today, we are watching the foundations of a new infrastructure boom: the cloud. And the uncomfortable question lingers, who is really building it, with whose money, and to what end?

For once, Africa is not being left completely out of the race. From fintech apps in Lagos to AI-driven health diagnostics in Nairobi, from e-learning platforms in Kampala to logistics optimization in Cairo, African startups are adopting AI at a pace that surprises even seasoned observers. But AI does not run on hope, it runs on servers. And those servers live in data centers. That is Africa’s first bottleneck.

The continent accounts for less than 2% of global data center capacity, according to the Africa Data Centres Association. Yet it holds nearly 18% of the world’s population. The mismatch means most of our AI tools run on clouds located in Europe, the U.S., or increasingly, the Gulf. Every time a Kenyan student asks ChatGPT a question, packets are bouncing thousands of kilometers away before returning with answers. Latency is a development tax.

Hyperscalers have spotted the gap. AWS planted a region in Cape Town. Microsoft Azure launched data centers in South Africa and is eyeing Kenya. Google has laid subsea cables, Equiano to improve connectivity along the West African coast. They promise faster speeds, lower costs, and “empowering” Africa’s digital future. On the surface, it’s a win. But scratch deeper, and the economics get murkier.

Building data centers isn’t charity. It’s capitalism at its most efficient: whoever owns the servers, owns the data flows, and eventually, the money. Africa is getting cloud regions not because the world suddenly feels generous, but because there’s a market to capture. Just as railways carried out ivory and tea, clouds will carry out transactions, data, and value, sometimes without us fully owning the rails.

Local players are pushing back. Liquid Intelligent Technologies, PAIX, and Raxio are building smaller regional hubs. Universities are experimenting with sovereign clouds. Governments from Kenya to Egypt are floating national data localization laws to keep more data within their borders. These efforts are about more than tech nationalism, they’re about sovereignty. Because in the digital economy, whoever controls the servers controls the future.

Then there’s the question nobody wants to talk about: power. You cannot run a hyperscale data center on an unstable grid. South Africa’s load shedding crisis is legendary. Nigeria burns diesel just to keep the lights on. Even Kenya, with its enviable geothermal base, still suffers outages. Cloud capacity doesn’t come free; it arrives tethered to energy choices. If Africa is serious about building the cloud for its billion people, it must solve the electricity bottleneck at the same time.

Investors are watching closely. A 2024 report by ResearchAndMarkets projected Africa’s cloud computing market will grow at 17% CAGR to 2030. The World Bank estimates digital transformation could add $180 billion to Africa’s GDP by 2025. These are staggering numbers but they’re contingent on infrastructure keeping pace. No power, no servers. No servers, no AI boom.

There is also a strategic risk: dependency. If Africa’s AI future is hosted entirely on AWS or Azure, we are effectively outsourcing our sovereignty. Imagine if trade disputes, sanctions, or global politics suddenly made those services harder to access. It wouldn’t just be inconvenience, it would paralyze entire sectors of our digital economy.

Still, optimism persists. The undersea cables are landing. The private equity money is flowing. Startups are innovating in payments, health, and education with tools that didn’t exist a decade ago. For every gap in infrastructure, there is a creative African solution trying to bridge it. Sometimes, it’s a micro-data center in a shipping container. Sometimes, it’s a local ISP finding ways to stretch limited bandwidth.

So who is building the cloud for Africa’s billion people? On paper, it’s a mix of hyperscalers, local telcos, and governments. But the deeper truth is that it’s a tug-of-war between capital, sovereignty, and necessity. If we don’t count the costs now, we may wake up a decade later to find the backbone of our digital economy controlled by outsiders, just as the railways once were.

You see, most basic users don’t catch what I’m saying but intelligent users do. Imagine I own a server in Nairobi: I can see what 1 million Kenyans are searching for, how much they are willing to spend, what returns they aim for. That means I can start building products at unprecedented speed while a local startup has to brainstorm an MVP, pitch for capital, wait months to raise rounds. The info asymmetry is real, and it gives foreign-backed clouds a huge head start.

We’re not speculating. IDC predicts that by 2025, data creation globally will hit ~175 zettabytes, with over 25% of that being real-time data. Insights from analytics show that organizations that manage data as a product deliver new use cases 90% faster than those that don’t. So yes, speed isn’t just convenience, it’s survival, and guess who has speed, the one who owns data.