First Brick Holdings, a Roha Group company, has announced plans for multiple investments to boost the digitalisation of East and southern Africa by funding and developing multiple data centres in the region
These data centres will open up new opportunities for financial services, governments and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) by addressing their mission-critical needs for data storage, business continuity and disaster recovery and create a network of data centres able to accommodate international and regional customers in state-of-the-art facilities.
Robert Mullins, executive director at First Brick Holdings, said, “Economic growth in East Africa is averaging between 5-10 per cent across the region. When combined with parallel trends in digitalisation and content consumption, we are seeing annual data usage and associated storage requirements increasing by 20-30 per cent.”
“From mission-critical enterprise services to e-government initiatives, the digital transformation of East Africa is being held back by the lack of secure, scalable, reliable, low latency data storage solutions. By leading investment in, and development of, data centres in the region, we are unlocking this latent demand in the market and removing a significant barrier to the continued digital transformation of this exciting and vibrant market,” he added.
First Brick Holdings’ initial investment is in Uganda, where the digital economy is accelerating at such a rate that there is an immediate requirement for facilities to store and process data safely and securely.
Raxio Data Centre Ltd. (“Raxio”) is delivering Uganda’s first state-of-the-art Tier III, carrier-neutral data centre in the Namanve Industrial and Business Park. With the opening in mid-2019, the data centre will offer capacity for up to 400 racks, delivering 1.5MW of IT power.
The Raxio data centre will be a key pillar to Uganda’s digital economy, reducing the cost of connectivity in the country and attracting global cloud service providers, content distribution networks and regional carriers.
“Data centre installations in East Africa are lagging behind other emerging economies, despite the region facing similar underlying trends in terms of the growth of data usage and storage requirements,” said James Byaruhanga, general manager, Raxio Data Centre Ltd.
First Brick Holdings plans to invest in additional facilities across the continent, with five Tier III data centres expected to be operational by 2022. With a total project investment of approximately US$50mn, First Brick Holdings will address the latent demand for data centre infrastructure in various local markets.
