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Rack Centre, a leading carrier-neutral data centre operator in West Africa, has announced an expansion programme to increase capacity to a total net lettable white space of 6000 sq m and allow 13 MW of IT capacity on its Lagos campus

This will be in addition to the current expansion already underway in early 2021 doubling existing capacity to 1.5MW and 1.200 sq m of white space.

The expansion will bring unprecedented carrier-neutral scale to West Africa and is in response to increasing demand for data centre space from cloud uptake, investment in telecommunications and IT facilities outsourcing by companies in the region.

Actis, a private equity firm in London, announced an investment in Rack Centre, taking a controlling stake in the business alongside Jagal, in March 2020. Funding for this expansion will come from a US$250mn pan-African data centre platform created by Actis and Convergence Partners, a leading investor in Africa’s ICT infrastructure.

In addition to Rack Centre, the platform is also actively developing additional buying and building opportunities across Africa to establish a network of carrier-neutral data centres aimed at catering to the carrier, cloud and hyper-scale customers.

Tim Parsonson, the co-founder of Teraco Data Environments, a neutral carrier operator in Africa, joins the Board as Chairperson. The platform has also engaged Frank Hassett, a veteran of the global data centre industry and previous vice-president of Infrastructure at Equinix, who brings over 1300MW of build and operate experience, to assist with hyper-scale expansion.

Dr Ayotunde Coker, managing director of Rack Centre, “Mass adoption of digital working models and content distribution is driving growing investment in the region and Rack Centre offers a world-class location to house these IT and telecoms facilities.”

With the data demands ever-increasing, the design of Rack Centre’s Phase 2 facility will target regional industry-leading Power Utilisation Efficiency (PUE) benchmarks. It will contribute in particular to achieving Sustainable Development Goals for affordable and clean energy, industry innovation and infrastructure and climate action. Rack Centre is working on various initiatives by green data centres to set other benchmarks in the landscape of the African data centre.

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