Rack Centre announces $100m expansion to create West Africa’s largest data centre.

Rack Centre announces $100m expansion to create West Africa’s largest data centre.

LAGOS, NIGERIA, 31 August 2020- Rack Centre, the leading carrier neutral data centre operator in West Africa, has announced an expansion programme that will increase capacity to a total net lettable white space of 6000 square metres and allow for 13MW of  IT power capacity in its Lagos campus. This will be in addition to the current expansion already underway to double existing capacity to 1.5MW and 1,200 square metres of white space in early 2021. 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, telecommunication investment and outsourcing of IT facilities by enterprises in the region.  

In March 2020, Actis, a London private equity firm, announced an investment in Rack Centre, taking a controlling stake in the business alongside Jagal.  The funding for this expansion will come from a $250m pan-African data centre platform established by Actis and Convergence Partners, a leading ICT infrastructure investor in Africa. In addition to Rack Centre, the platform is also actively developing additional buy and build opportunities across Africa, to establish a network of carrier neutral data centres aimed at catering to carrier, cloud and hyperscale customers.  Tim Parsonson, co-founder of Teraco Data Environments, the largest carrier neutral 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 hyperscale expansion.  

“Africa is at the start of a critical time in its development, as the 4th industrial revolution offers the chance to leapfrog many of Africa’s challenges and harness the immense potential of its people. Convergence Partners is delighted to partner with Actis in accelerating the growth of high quality data centre infrastructure, an indispensable part of the foundation of this revolution in the region.” said Andile Ngcaba, chairman of Convergence Partners.

With 138 million Internet subscribers, more than any country in Africa or Europe, and the largest population and GDP in Africa, Nigeria is a key entry point for global telecommunications, content and cloud players seeking access to the region.  However, a lack of cost effective, energy efficient IT infrastructure has been a constraint to doing business in the region.  Rack Centre brings global best practice to Nigeria, as the first carrier neutral data centre in the region to achieve Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF). As a uniquely scale carrier neutral player, Rack Centre allows unrestricted connectivity between customers, telecommunication carriers and internet exchange points within its data centres.  

"We are proud of the quality and scale bar we have set in the region and are scaling to be the de-facto digital data hub for West Africa”, says 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” 

Supporting this ambition, engineering consultancy Arup have been appointed for the project.  Arup’s multidisciplinary data centre design teams are world leaders in the design and construction of data centres, having designed over 2,000MW of IT capacity for industry leading tech giants and co-location providers across the globe.

Sustainability and Energy Savings

Data centres are energy intensive. 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, and will contribute towards [Sustainable Development Goals] in particular Affordable and Clean Energy, Industry Innovation and Infrastructure and Climate Action.  Rack Centre is working on various green data centre initiatives to set other benchmarks in the Africa data centre landscape.

About Rack Centre

Founded in 2012, Rack Centre is the only carrier neutral Tier III Constructed Facility Certified data centre in Africa and focuses solely on providing best in class data centre colocation services and unrestricted interconnect between carriers and customers.  This gives customers a technically superior, physically more secure and lower cost environment for their information systems.

Rack Centre’s carrier neutrality allows customers to manage traffic to get better value, lower latency and higher resilience, and creates an open market for partnerships between customers, networks, cloud and content providers, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria and managed service providers.  

Rack Centre clients include 40 telecommunication carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), global Tier 1 networks and pan Africa international carriers, including direct connection to all 5 undersea cables serving the South Atlantic Coast of Africa and every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa.  

For more information on Rack Centre:

Ejieke Ezeadiugwu

T : +234 809 038 1304

E : ejieke.ezeadiugwu@rack-centre.com

     www.rack-centre.com

About Actis  

Actis is a leading emerging markets investor. With a growing portfolio of investments across Asia, Africa and Latin America, Actis has raised over US$15bn since inception, and deployed capital across the real estate, private equity, energy and infrastructure asset classes.

 

The responsible investing ethos of ‘values-drive-value’, is at the heart of Actis’ belief that capital invested in growth markets can and should be transformational, leading to sustainable value creation and mitigation of risk.

 

Actis is a signatory to the United Nations backed Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), an investor initiative developed by the UNEP FI and the UN Global Compact. The firm has been awarded the highest rating score, A* for the third consecutive year in the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) independent assessment. 

About Convergence Partners 

Convergence Partners is a seasoned pan-African private equity investor experienced in growing businesses to deliver enhanced investment returns while simultaneously driving continental development through investment in information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and services.  With over US$300mn of capital under management, Convergence Partners brings its skills, experience and capital to develop new investment opportunities as well as actively adding value to investments across the lifecycle of ICT assets. As a value investor, the firm accelerates communications access, digital inclusion and ICT infrastructure development in Africa

 To date Convergence Partners has partnered with several global best-in-breed operators and has played a leading role in landmark African ICT infrastructure investments that have changed the paradigm in pricing of broadband services and availability of reliable, quality networks, services and new technology offerings.

 For more information, visithttp://www.convergencepartners.com/