Helios announces African data centre investments
Helios Investment Partners, acting on behalf of funds it advises, has acquired majority stakes in Maroc Datacenter (MDC), a carrier neutral data centre in Morocco, and in IXAfrica Data Centre Limited, a developer and operator of hyperscale-ready data centres in Kenya. Both transactions are subject to customary closing conditions.
MDC operates in the Rabat metro area of Morocco. Since its launch in 2017, MDC has delivered 100% uptime, providing mission-critical co-location and cloud services for its growing customer base of blue-chip public and private institutions. This facility will serve as a key building block in a broader Helios hyperscale data centre (DC) platform in the Rabat and Casablanca metro areas, serving global hyperscale, domestic enterprise and carrier customers. Morocco benefits from a highly skilled workforce and a large number of addressable enterprises for digital connectivity. These factors, combined with a relatively stable macroeconomic environment and favourable regulatory and data sovereignty regimes, make it an attractive cloud deployment destination.
IXAfrica was established in Kenya in 2021 to capitalise on the soaring demand for internet connectivity from Kenya’s young and highly digitally-connected population, and from the rapid adoption of cloud solutions among the country’s enterprises. The company’s strategic location alongside the Mombasa Road in the nation’s capital, Nairobi, provides ready access to virtually all existing primary internet connectivity infrastructure. Upon full build-out of the Nairobi campus, IXAfrica is expected to establish a leading position in Kenya, delivering over 20MW of hyperscale-ready capacity. Kenya benefits from access to diverse internet fibre connectivity, reliable and low-carbon sources of energy from its power grid, a relatively stable political environment and a constructive regulatory framework.
Helios has played a pioneering role in investing in the development of digital infrastructure in Africa.
In 2006, Helios founded the first independent company in Africa devoted to building and operating telecom towers and went on to create additional shared infrastructure businesses across the continent. The African towers industry has since attracted billions of dollars of equity and debt capital to the continent, creating jobs and developing skills, freeing mobile operators to outsource non-core activities and focus on innovation, and improving access by driving down costs for customers. The increased quality and reach of connectivity in turn has facilitated African innovation in areas such as mobile payments.
The next phase of the continent’s telecommunications transformation offers new and significant opportunities in digital infrastructure. Africa’s growth in data consumption is amongst the fastest globally, driven by demand from a young, growing, digitally native population, as well as a strong and accelerating trend of cloud and digital technology adoption within both private enterprises and the public sector. The continent’s data centre capacity, a key enabler of the digital transformation, remains severely underdeveloped, and substantial additional capacity is needed to meet latent and future demand.