Airtel Africa has launched a new data centre business aimed at building new networks of data centres in Africa to meet the continent’s growing needs for trusted and sustainable data centres.
Dubbed Nxtra, the new product which is founded on Airtel’s commitment to meet Africa’s growing data needs, will also seek to increase the company’s capacity to serve the rising African digital economy.
Airtel says that Nxtra’s ambition will allow it to serve the growing needs of African enterprises and its data centre infrastructure.
The product will be designed to host the next generation of computing, while providing multi-MW capacity in a phased manner.
These facilities, coupled with Airtel Africa’s extensive fibre footprint, will meet stringent global security requirements and meet ‘five nines’1 availability.
Airtel Africa’s Group chief executive officer Segun Ogunsanya said that Nxtra will offer secure and scalable integrated solutions to global hyper-scalers, large African enterprises, startups, SMEs and governments.
“A rapid increase in data centre capacity is needed to support the growth potential of Africa’s digital economy. We are proud to drive the future of Africa’s digital infrastructure, unlocking opportunities for businesses to grow and fueling economic prosperity,” said Ogunsanya.
“Airtel Africa’s team has consistently shown our ability to deliver on infrastructure projects across Africa, and we are confident that our next generation data centres will support our ambition to become the partner of choice for global customers and Africa’s newest tech unicorns alike,” he added.
The company also argued that it intends to improve speed to access digital services through locally available data centre capacity, thus helping power increased innovation, while supporting a new generation of African tech talent.
Furthermore, Nxtra is enabling customers to meet data sovereignty requirements while at the same time enabling more local cloud services to be offered in the countries where Airtel Africa operates.
The first major Nxtra facility in Lagos, Nigeria, will deliver 34 MW of total power. It is designed to host high density racks and integrate the latest best practice construction to achieve 1.3 power usage effectiveness (PUE). It is expected to be live in mid-2025.
To deliver on Nxtra’s vision, Airtel Africa has appointed Yashnath Issur, the former head of Global Data Centre Portfolio Management at Amazon Web Services, as CEO of Nxtra by Airtel.
Yashnath has 16 years of experience in the industry and has, over the past year, built a team of experts to execute on the strategy.
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