The Core to Edge Innovation in Africa

Africa has 17% of world population, but only 4% of world GDP and 1% of implemented data centre digital infrastructure.  Progress is being made with the undersea cables serving the Atlantic and Pacific coast lines of Africa, and enhanced with the recent announcements and implementation of Google’s Equiano Cable, and Meta’s 2Africa.  Progress is being made in progression of fibre optic penetration away from the seaboards into the ‘spine’ of Africa with more access to broadband penetration.  South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya dominate the implementation of data centres.  However there has to be complementary distributed data centre infrastructure across the continent, and in penetrating countries to enable delivery of content efficiently to the point of consumption and enabling 5G penetration.  OADC’s core to edge strategy aims to achieve that.  Implementing core, hyperscale data centres at key locations, and OADC EDGE data centres distributed to points to consumption.  The ‘midi’ data centres deliver right sized data centre infrastructures to countries where the right scale is required.  The presentation outlines the core – to -edge strategy, and in particular, the progress of implementing over 26 OADC EDGE data centres in South Africa.  The Midi and Core data centres have also been landing the Equiano and 2Africa cables at other locations in Africa.  The expansion plan is rapid and concurrent.