Panellists discuss building Africa’s digital infrastructure backbone at the Nedbank CIB ICT Conference. (Photograph by E-Image)
The provision of reliable energy is the top barrier encountered by data centre operators in their operations in South Africa and the rest of Africa.
This was highlighted yesterday during a panel discussion at the 2025 Nedbank CIB ICT Conference, in Sandton, where multinational data centre operators noted some of the challenges when entering markets on the continent.
The conference brought together policy-makers, leaders of digital infrastructure firms, innovators and industry partners to unpack the issues surrounding accelerating and shaping SA’s digital future.
Discussing building Africa’s infrastructure backbone was a panel consisting of Finhai Munzara, chief corporate development officer at Cassava Technologies; Equinix MD Sandile Dube; and IOT.NXT CEO Lazo Karapanagiotidis.
In addition to power supply, Dube pointed to the issue of regulation restricting some of the progress for operators.
“Data centres consume a lot of energy. While a lot has been done in South Africa to bring stability into energy provision, there is a conversation to be had in relation to supporting data centres more efficiently, from an energy point of view, to drive more investments into the sector.
“The other is the misconceptions about the continent itself. Africa is not a country; it is a continent. For us, we’ve found that it’s held us back a little bit from really driving a lot more investments into the continent.
“Added to this is the instability of our markets. We’ve seen what is happening in West Africa, from a forex point of view, so there is that perception that what’s happening there permeates across the entire continent.”
Munzara agreed that from a data centre perspective, power is important. “Having a stable grid and access to more power [is key]. As these data centres expand, the kind of workloads that you’re seeing coming through calls for more power.”
According to Munzara, the global data centre network consumes 3% of the power worldwide. “Globally, this power consumption will grow to 10% to 12% in the age of AI [artificial intelligence]. With that kind of expansion, the question becomes whether we’ll continue to get access to the amount of power that we need on the current grid.
“As we start looking at things like power wheeling, renewables…is the transmission equipment stable enough to support that? That is a key [consideration] that will drive the competitiveness of the data centre market, particularly in South Africa and the rest of the continent.”
He added that from a connectivity and broadband perspective, it is well regulated and it’s an industry that’s been around for a long time. “Because we [Cassava] build cross-border fibre networks, there is the usual challenges around regulation, crossing borders and wayleaves, but that’s hardly something that has been tackled around the regulations.
“I would really highlight that the critical one as we go into this digital revolution of powering AI, I do think the potential bottleneck would be access to reliable energy.”
South Africa is the largest data centre market on the continent, as hyperscalers and data centre operators continue to establish cloud regions, according to a report by Grand View Research.
The country is considered a ‘sweet spot’ for operators due to several factors, including the growing cloud market and digital economy. It is also the largest and most digitally-developed nation on the African continent.
The Southern African nation has seen data centre operators − including Africa Data Centres, Open Access Data Centres, Teraco (Digital Realty), Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Vantage Data Centres − make sizeable investments in this space.
US-based digital infrastructure company Equinix officially entered the local market last October, launching its first International Business Exchange data centre in SA.
While there are identifiable challenges relating to power consumption, Dube indicated that digital infrastructure also exports a lot of power.
“What we need to get better at is figuring out what to do with the power generated by some of the data centres. We’ve seen in some instances, for example, the recent Olympics used the power generated from the data centres to warm up the swimming pools.
“Consider what can be done with the heat that is exported by data centres in the local market. We need to balance the two in relation to the requirement that we need versus the opportunity that could also be unlocked because of that.”
Karapanagiotidis said part of what excites him the most is the focus on solving some of the problems the country faces.
“I make a joke with my team and say, ‘there are two things we are really good at in this country and that is crime and not always keeping the lights on’. It’s an amazing opportunity to harness some of the things we do in energy management and security, tracking scarce or critical assets.”
