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Business Reporter

LIQUID Intelligent Technologies has opened its fifth mega data centre in South Africa, as it doubles down on a continental drive to growing data centres sector where it is targeting to build 10 data facilities in Africa’s largest cities.

Liquid founder and Zimbabwean billionaire, Mr Strive Masiyiwa, revealed the details in his Facebook blog. The London-based tech-entrepreneur said the company has secured US$500 million in equity and loans for the development of the data centres.

“We have now secured over $500m in equity and loans to build what we call ‘Project Decima’; the largest Data Centre campuses in 10 African countries, each representing an investment of $50m,” he wrote.

“We call such large data centre facilities ‘Hyper Scale’, because they are designed to accommodate the needs of large global tech companies that support cloud-based services. 

“We offer our customers unique and unequalled innovation; each of these facilities is interconnected with our 100,000 km fibre network, that spans the entire continent.”

While the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has frustrated many investment projects, Mr Masiyiwa said there were still positive hopes ahead.

“Covid can delay but it cannot deny…it is not the end of the world,” he posted.

Liquid, the largest pan-African operator of data centres through its subsidiary Africa Data Centres (ADC), already operates facilities in five countries on the African continent.

The company largely focuses on ‘hyper scale’ facilities – huge facilities that mainly attract global tech giants and the financial services sector because of their exacting and rigorous specifications.

Given that data centres are capital intensive investments, Liquid has had to approach global development finance institutions, such as the UK government’s CDC, the World Bank’s private sector investor IFC, as well as the US government’s Development Finance Corporation, to mobilize capital.

Mr Masiyiwa, who last in South Africa in February 2020 had at that time visited the construction site of the largest building ever constructed under the project, the 20MW Data Centre in Johannesburg.

He said the facility consumes more power than many major cities on the continent but clarified that each of their facility were designed to use renewable energy provided by DPA, a power division under the Econet Global group.

“By the time I visited, work had already started and I looked forward to returning in a year’s time to commission it.

“Then Covid hit, and we had to stop construction several times due to lockdowns,” wrote Mr Masiyiwa. 

“We finally finished last week and our first customers began to put in their computers. During the same time, we began a project of a similar size in Lagos Nigeria.”