Pan African Data Centres Exhibition and Conference, June 16th, 2024
Infrastructure Masons and the Africa Data Centers Association are collaborating to drive an agenda that enables Africa to lead the world in sustainable and responsible digital infrastructure development. The combination of iMasons’ global perspective, ADCA’s local market intelligence and the greenfield opportunities across Africa set the stage to achieve economic, social and ecological balance in every community where digital infrastructure is deployed.
Africa is home to 1.5 billion people, or 17% of the global population. The population is young, rapidly urbanizing and eager to participate in the digital economy. Today, there are 307 MW of live data center capacity across the continent, or less than 2% of the global total, with most of this capacity concentrated in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. A dozen more African countries have economies sufficient to support the data center and cloud services ecosystem, according to ADCA, and estimates indicate at least 1,200 MW of new capacity is required by 2030 to meet the continent’s demand for digital services. This gap between the demand for digital services in Africa and deployed digital infrastructure is an opportunity for iMasons and ADCA to apply lessons learned from other markets around the world to support Africa becoming a leader in responsible and sustainable digital infrastructure deployment and accelerate Africa’s participation in the digital economy.
In the recent iMasons’ State of the Industry Report, global members identified four universal challenges to meeting today’s unprecedented demand for digital infrastructure:
- Access to concentrated sources of clean power
- Ability to find, train, hire and retain people to build, operate and maintain digital infrastructure
- Willingness to earn a positive perception by being a good neighbor in the communities where digital infrastructure is deployed
- Steadfast focus on decarbonization of digital infrastructure to protect the planet.
The proposed solution to these challenges: clean energy zones. Clean energy zones are master-planned towns or city-sized areas developed around concentrated sources of clean energy to serve multiple industries, including multi-tenant data center complexes. iMasons and ADCA could work with local governments in Africa to incentivize the development of clean energy zones, to provide opportunities for the digital infrastructure industry to leapfrog the power, people, perception and planet challenges faced in other regions of the world.
iMasons and the ADCA are organizing an Executive Meeting to continue working on those initiatives and opportunities for the continent around the next ITW Africa event in Nairobi by September 12-14 2024. Event updates will be posted at imasons.org/events.
