The demand for data centers continues to grow on the African continent, which is also experiencing high demand for high-speed connectivity and cloud services. Local and foreign companies are stepping up investments to meet this demand.
Ghana’s Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia last week inaugurated a Tier 4 data center in Amrahia, Adentan Municipality, Greater Accra Region. With a capacity of 20 megawatts for a total investment of USD 48 million, the new infrastructure will help meet the growing demand for digital services in Ghana and West Africa.
The facility has a world-class infrastructure with redundancy for all components as well as optimal uptime of up to 99.95%. Which allows it to host the data storage servers of different organizations and companies, keeping them in working order without interruption. The facility is partly powered by solar energy. Connectivity will be provided by Vodafone, Comsys Holdings Corp and CSquared Innovations Inc. Onix DC also plans to install an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) there.
In March 2021, the African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIM) fund and the management team of Onix Data Centers Ltd acquired a majority stake in Ngoya Etix DC (Ghana) Ltd, a neutral data center. operators and with a capacity of 170 racks. The goal was to expand it and make it the largest data center in Ghana. This investment comes against a backdrop of increased competition in the growing African data center market. Earlier this month, Africa Data Centers (ADC) announced that it was building a 30 megawatt data center in Accra.
This investment is part of the digital ambitions of the Ghanaian government. As digital transformation accelerates across Africa, Accra wants to ensure that the country has adequate data on which its digitization program will thrive. According to Bawumia, the new data center “ will meet increasingly stringent requirements imposed by regulated entities such as banks, healthcare providers and certain branches of government that handle sensitive information .”