That turns local cloud in Lagos, Nigeria, from a sales pitch into a compliance requirement, and carriers are positioning accordingly. TelCables Nigeria is the West African subsidiary of Angola Cables, which owns the SACS cable between Angola and Brazil and capacity on WACS and MONET. Its parent upgraded its Atlantic systems with Ciena last month.

Fernando Fernandes, chief executive of TelCables Nigeria and West Africa since 2023, answered tech.africa’s written questions on what Nigerian banks and fintechs now ask for, where route diversity still falls short, and where the company is investing next.

This Q&A has been edited for house style and length. The answers are Fernandes’s own words.

For readers meeting TelCables Nigeria for the first time: what do you run today, and who buys from you?

TelCables Nigeria is the Nigerian subsidiary of Angola Cables, a multinational telecommunications and digital services provider. Its other subsidiaries include TelCables Southern and East Africa, TelCables Middle East, TelCables Europe and TelCables Brazil.

We sell international capacity and IP transit over our own subsea cables, SACS, WACS and MONET, and over partner systems including EllaLink, Equiano and 2Africa. The company owns and operates a 33,000 km subsea network and extends its reach to more than 50,000 km through those partnerships. That gives us direct, low-latency routes from West Africa to the US, South America and London.

On top of the network we offer:

• Global connectivity: IP transit to Tier 1 carriers including Tata, Telxius, GTT and Cogent, dedicated internet access without the customer needing its own autonomous system number, and remote peering to more than 27 internet exchange points (IXPs) worldwide.
• Clouds2Africa: local infrastructure and platform services, virtual machines, backup, disaster recovery, business continuity and content delivery network (CDN) services.
• Go4AI: local GPU infrastructure to host AI workloads.
• Security and integration: Shields2Africa distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection with 15 Tbps of mitigation capacity and 12 scrubbing centres, SD-WAN, and direct on-ramps to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Our customers range from banks, fintechs and payment service providers to Tier 1 content providers such as Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Cloudflare and Akamai, as well as ISPs, OTT services, CDNs, research institutions, and small businesses and startups that need virtual machines on demand.

Nigeria has no shortage of carriers and data-centre operators chasing the same enterprise and banking customers. What does TelCables Nigeria offer that they do not?

Very simple, and those who know us know it very well. I will point out three things.

First, we have route diversity that others don’t have. Our SACS cable is the only direct South Atlantic route from Africa to Latin America. Combined with MONET, WACS and EllaLink, we offer low-latency southern routes to the US, Brazil and Europe that bypass the congested West African coast. That has become a critical factor after the recent WACS cuts and disruptions.

Second, our local cloud is truly local, technically and commercially. Clouds2Africa runs two live cloud nodes in Nigeria today, in the Tier III data centres of Rack Centre on the mainland and Digital Realty in Victoria Island. Because the data stays in Nigeria, there are no egress fees for most use cases and no migration fees. Bandwidth and IP are included, and billing is in naira via Paystack. The large international cloud providers charge in US dollars and bill for capacity or traffic.

Third, it is compliant. Clouds2Africa holds Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) certification, plus ISO, SOC 1 and SOC 2, uses an AWS-compatible architecture, and is backed by a team of more than 30 engineers who can move workloads securely without downtime.

What are banks and fintechs asking you for now that they were not asking for two years ago?

Two years ago it was uptime with affordable international transit. Now it’s:

• CBN compliance: mandatory localisation of transaction data by 1 January 2027.
• Naira-priced cloud, to remove FX volatility.
• In-country backup and disaster recovery: two nodes, not one.
• Zero egress costs and predictable pricing, with a calculator.
• Local AI: Go4AI and a new multi-model AI API that gives one integration to Claude, Llama, DeepSeek and Kimi, with DDoS protection embedded.

The conversation has shifted from “connect me” to “keep my data sovereign, compliant, AI-ready and secure”.

Your op-ed makes the case for local cloud and resilient infrastructure. Which parts of that does TelCables provide itself, and where do you rely on partners?

Angola Cables and TelCables provide the international backbone (SACS, WACS and MONET, with partner connections to anywhere), an extensive global network of more than 500 cloud nodes and the Clouds2Africa platform, Go4AI, Shields2Africa, IP transit and Global Data Centre Interconnect.

With partners, we provide route diversity and physical resilience. We colocate in Rack Centre, Medallion and other Tier III facilities, and use metro networks such as Djoliba for West African reach. We also partner for hybrid cloud on-ramps, and for payments, with Paystack handling naira wallets.

Which gap in Nigerian infrastructure costs your customers most today, and what is TelCables doing about it?

There are essentially two hidden costs: FX and egress fees, and the fragility of depending on a single route, WACS, along the West African coast.

What we are doing about it: terabit-scale dark-fibre rings interconnecting the major Lagos data centres, dual in-country nodes for backup and disaster recovery, southbound subsea diversity to reduce cable-cut risk, zero egress fees and naira billing. That localises traffic, cuts latency and removes transfer costs.

Power and the last mile remain challenges. We address them through our multiple Tier III sites and our partnerships across Africa and the rest of the world.

Where is TelCables Nigeria investing over the next two years, and why there?

• Deepening our footprint in Lagos: more capacity on the dark-fibre rings, and hardening the second mainland node.
• Expanding points of presence beyond Lagos: Abuja and Port Harcourt are the next logical step, following demand and the NFW multi-city expansion [Nigeria Fintech Week, which in 2026 ran programmes in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt].
• More local GPU capacity for sovereign AI.
• More data-centre integrations. Besides our connections to around 27 IXPs, we have access to more than 1,000 data centres globally, which is a particular advantage for hybrid cloud operators.
• Through partners such as Megaport, whose virtual fabric stretches across the globe, we can provide several “as a service” offerings depending on client requirements.

Nigeria Fintech Week has just closed. Did anything you heard there change your plans?

Three points stood out:

• Fintechs must move beyond payments to become economic infrastructure for credit, insurance and savings.
• Resilience is not about preventing failure, but about detecting, containing and recovering from disruptions.
• Scale is now massive. NIBSS Instant Payment processed about 11 billion transactions in 2024, against 5 billion in 2022, so dependence on infrastructure is that much higher.

We have not changed our plans or our direction. We have accelerated them, with more focus on resilient dual-node cloud, naira economics, and payment infrastructure that can go cross-border from local bank accounts, a point Remita also made at the event.

Data centres have become an increasingly visible part of the infrastructure underpinning today’s digital economy. As organisations adopt cloud services, artificial intelligence (AI), digital financial services and other data-intensive technologies, demand for data centre capacity continues to grow across Africa.

At the same time, data centres are attracting greater scrutiny than ever before because of the resources they require. Electricity consumption, water use and environmental impact have all become significant deliberations, particularly in markets where energy and water resources are already under pressure, drawing attention towards more efficient and responsible operations.

Africa needs digital infrastructure to enable growth, and data centres are an important piece of that equation. The challenge is therefore to find the right balance between expanding capacity and managing the resources required for operation.

Efficiency must become central to design

Sustainability in the data centre environment is not one-dimensional. It encompasses energy efficiency, power resilience, water consumption, cooling, equipment utilisation and the source of the energy being used.

Power resilience, for example, should mean more than having generators available when the grid fails. Operators also need to consider the environmental impact of how the facility is powered and identify opportunities to incorporate renewable generation and energy storage.

Cooling is another area where practical changes can make a difference. Data centres can handle rising heat loads without using proportionally more electricity and water. For instance, closed-loop cooling systems can reduce dependence on water, while hot- and cold-aisle containment can improve airflow management and reduce the amount of energy required to cool the wider facility. In appropriate climates, facilities can also make use of cooler external air during certain periods rather than relying entirely on mechanical cooling.

These measures are relatively straightforward and show that sustainability does not always require a dramatic technological overhaul. Improving the efficiency of the systems already operating within a facility can make a meaningful contribution to its overall resource consumption.

A diverse energy mix, not a single fix

Another area of rising interest is alternative energy sources for data centres. Solar and wind can play a role where conditions make them viable, while battery energy storage can help address the intermittency of renewable generation, carrying facilities through periods when generation is lower.

For South Africa in particular, reducing reliance on diesel for backup power is an important consideration. Gas can offer a lower-emission alternative to diesel and, in some circumstances, existing generator equipment can be converted to operate on it. But this should not be viewed as the end point of the sustainability journey. Gas remains a fossil fuel, yet where it can reduce emissions while providing reliable backup capacity, it may be one step in a transition towards a more diversified energy mix.

The broader objective should therefore be to combine resilience, efficiency and lower-emission energy sources rather than treating any single technology as the answer.

The most sustainable data centre is not necessarily the newest one

As the data centre market develops, there is also an important question around what happens to existing facilities.

It can be tempting to assume that building new facilities around the latest technology is the only route to improving efficiency. However, replacing an existing data centre is a significant undertaking, and rebuilding is not automatically the most sustainable or economically sensible option.

There are circumstances where a purpose-built facility will offer substantially better efficiency, particularly when older infrastructure is approaching the end of its useful life, but targeted upgrades can also deliver value.

Retrofitting solar generation to an existing data centre, replacing ageing chillers with more efficient equipment, upgrading uninterruptible power supply systems or improving cooling and airflow management can all contribute to better performance without requiring a complete rebuild.

The right approach will depend on the age and condition of the operation, the remaining useful life of its infrastructure, the cost of the upgrade and the expected payback period. In other words, sustainability needs to be considered alongside the practical economics of the investment.

Location matters too

There is another dimension to sustainable data centre development that is sometimes overlooked: location.

A data centre’s environmental efficiency is important, but so are its connectivity, proximity to customers, disaster recovery considerations and ability to maintain the workloads it was built to serve.

A highly efficient facility that is poorly connected or located in an unsuitable environment may not be a sustainable long-term proposition. This is particularly relevant as cloud and data centre capacity expand across Africa; a sustainable cloud region needs to bring together efficient power and cooling with the connectivity, resilience and equipment required to make the facility commercially viable.

Sustainability is not only about how much electricity or water a facility consumes, but also about how effectively it serves the digital services and economic activity that depend on it.

Doing more with less

The growth of AI adds another layer to this discussion. AI workloads require significantly greater computing density, which in turn places additional demands on power and cooling infrastructure, again sharpening the focus on efficiency. As workloads grow, data centre operators cannot simply keep adding resources at the same rate. They need to look at how to deliver greater computing capacity while controlling the required energy, water and other resources.

This is where the sustainability conversation becomes more constructive. Rather than treating digital growth and environmental responsibility as opposing objectives, the industry should focus on improving the efficiency of the infrastructure that enables the development.

For data centre operators, this means considering the full lifecycle of the system, from the energy source and cooling technology through to equipment replacement.

For customers, it means asking where their workloads are hosted as well as how efficiently that infrastructure operates.

And for the industry as a whole, it means recognising that the data centres required to strengthen Africa’s digital economy will need to become increasingly resource efficient as they scale. This goes beyond adding data centre capacity in Africa. It is about developing it in a way that advances digital and economic growth while making better use of available energy, water and infrastructure resources.

The company announced the milestone on 5 October 2026. It does not lend its own money: Furaha runs onboarding, identity checks, credit scoring, disbursement and collections for its partner banks, Diamond Trust Bank Uganda, Cairo Bank Uganda, Opportunity Bank and FINCA Uganda, which fund the short-term loans.

Scoring parents banks cannot see

Furaha’s case is that many parents can repay but have no credit history, collateral or payslip for a bank to assess, and that school-fee deadlines rarely line up with when families are paid. It scores them using alternative data, including mobile money and school-fee payment records, drawing on partners such as MTN, Airtel, and the school-payment platforms SchoolPay, SurePay, and PegPay.

“Millions of parents have never been seen by traditional credit systems, not necessarily because they can’t repay, but because the data needed to assess them has not existed in one place,” said Yustus Aribariho, a co-founder of Furaha.

That is the same gap African banks themselves rank high among uses for AI: a survey of the sector in July found credit scoring for thin-file customers second only to fraud detection. Furaha was incubated by SC Ventures.

What it did not disclose

Furaha did not say how much it has lent, what interest rates parents pay, or how many loans are repaid on time. It describes itself as the first lending fintech in Africa to channel commercial-bank financing towards education, a claim tech.africa could not independently verify.

The company is also careful about its own reach. It cites UNESCO’s estimate that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for nearly 40% of the world’s out-of-school children, and says financing “addresses one barrier to school attendance; it is not a solution to every cause of exclusion”.

“The 100,000-child milestone is an important proof point, but it is not the destination,” said chief executive Dennis Musinguzi.

Other investors are backing finance built into everyday software: in July, Renew Capital picked 15 embedded-finance startups that put financial products into the tools small businesses already use.

The cohort, announced on 5 October 2026, was drawn from revenue-generating, South African-led startups. Google says the applications were its largest pool yet. The teams will work with Google engineers and mentors until a demo day in December 2026.

The 2026 cohort

Education and young people account for a third of the class:

• Ambani Africa: an app that teaches children African languages
• Buddy Learning: an AI tutor on WhatsApp built for low data use
• Kasicoach: AI mentoring on WhatsApp and Telegram for township and rural youth
• Thuto: AI tools to improve learning outcomes
• Zumii: sources and delivers school stationery to parents via WhatsApp

Financial services account for 3:

• Boleka Africa: credit, savings and payments for underbanked adults
• Fly n Pay Later: flights paid for in instalments
• Scale: a platform for startups to launch and issue card products

The rest serve businesses, health, transport and retail:

• Anvaya Legal AI: legal research, drafting and document review
• Daedalis: verified data infrastructure and enterprise AI for supply chains
• Dataseka: analytics that turn scattered business data into insights
• Tradeflow: automated supplier invoicing and ordering for restaurants
• Muna Africa: infrastructure for retailers’ circular fashion resale programmes
• Propela Health: a marketplace linking African healthcare professionals with global employers
• Bro: a platform connecting passengers with affordable transport

The wider programme

Google says the accelerator has supported more than 190 startups across 17 African countries since 2018, which, between them, have raised more than US$400 million and created over 3,500 jobs. Those figures cover the programme as a whole, not this cohort.

The South African programme runs alongside Google’s pan-African accelerator, which picked its tenth class in May and graduated 15 AI startups in June.

The agreement, announced in Marrakech, Morocco, on 5 October 2026, covers Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Chad and Gabon. Both companies say they already have active engagements in those markets. No projects, sites, contract values or timelines were disclosed.

Getting in earlier on state projects

The logic of the deal is access. Vertiv sells power, cooling and critical infrastructure equipment; Cybastion brings relationships with governments running national digital transformation programmes. The pairing is meant to put Vertiv’s equipment into those programmes at the planning stage rather than at tender.

“As AI, cloud and sovereign digital infrastructure investments accelerate across Africa, customers are increasingly seeking end-to-end ecosystems rather than standalone technology providers,” said Zineb Kamri, regional director for Northwest Africa at Vertiv. She said the arrangement would give the company “access to additional prospects”.

Kamri said Cybastion’s existing footprint in West and Central Africa complements Vertiv’s regional growth plans, and singled out Morocco as “a key market, especially given its ambition to become a regional digital hub and attract hyperscale and AI infrastructure investments”.

Dr Thierry Wandji, CEO of Cybastion, framed the deal around sovereignty. He said the partnership “strengthens our ability to rapidly deploy the critical digital infrastructure needed to help African countries move toward digital sovereignty”.

Vertiv’s North and West African push

Vertiv has been building its presence in North Africa this year. In April it installed chilled-water cooling at Inwi’s Rabat data centre, and in June Open Access Data Centres standardised on Vertiv at its Johannesburg facility.

An MoU is a framework rather than a contract. The test will be whether named government data centre projects in any of the 6 countries follow suit, and which of the two companies leads them.

The company launched SmartReset on 6 October 2026, a debt and financial reset programme delivered through employers. Paymenow says it serves more than 1 million employees across South Africa, Namibia, Zambia and Pakistan, and aims to help 10 million employees in those markets become debt-free by 2035.

Debt, insurance and savings

SmartReset works in 3 stages. It first checks an employee’s debts for reckless lending and prescribed debt, then builds a budget and a repayment plan for what remains. It then reviews whether the employee is paying for duplicate insurance cover, and whether existing cover is suitable and fairly priced.

Money freed up in the first two stages is moved into a savings account. Each employee works with an accredited financial coach, and Paymenow says it tracks participants after the reset to stop them falling back into debt. The service is free for both employees and employers.

“Millions of South Africans are under real financial pressure and have nowhere to turn. SmartReset identifies these employees, gets to the root of what is holding them back, and helps them recover,” said Deon Nobrega, CEO of Paymenow.

Simon Trupp, CEO of SmartReset, said earned wage access alone does not solve the underlying problem. “Helping someone reach month-end matters, but it does not clear the debt they are already carrying or repair the credit record shutting them out of affordable finance,” he said.

The pressure on borrowers

DebtBusters’ 2026 Money-Stress Tracker, which surveyed nearly 18,000 website subscribers in May and June, found that 72% were experiencing money stress, up from 70% in 2025. The sample is not representative of the population, but the trend matches the official data.

The National Credit Regulator’s Credit Bureau Monitor for the first quarter of 2025 counted 28.9 million credit-active consumers, of whom 10.4 million, or 36%, had impaired credit records. The South African Reserve Bank then raised the repo rate by 25 basis points to 7.25% on 23 September 2026, its second increase this year, pushing up repayments on variable-rate debt.

From wage access to debt rehabilitation

SmartReset builds on Paymenow’s merger with PayCurve earlier this year, which added debt rehabilitation, affordability assessments and money coaching to its wage-access product. Earned wage access has grown fastest among younger workers, with under-35s leading uptake in South Africa.

Paymenow says several large South African employers have already made SmartReset available to staff, but did not name them or say how many employees have enrolled. Those numbers will show whether the 2035 target is a plan or a slogan.

MTN Group told shareholders on 2 October 2026 that its Ghanaian subsidiary, Scancom, had received a notice of award from the National Communications Authority (NCA). It covers 3 lots of 50 MHz in the 3 GHz band (150 MHz total) for US$101.1 million, and 2 lots in the 700 MHz band (2 x 20 MHz) for US$100.9 million. The licences run for 15 years.

The contested band

The 3 GHz band was the only one in the round where demand exceeded supply. When bids were opened on 11 September 2026, the NCA reported that MTN and Telecel Ghana had applied for 4 lots between them, against 3 available.

Under the round’s rules, oversubscribed lots go to a second round of sealed bids and are awarded in descending order of price. MTN’s notice covers all 3 lots. The NCA has not yet published the final outcome for the band.

MTN bid as the only operator the NCA designates as having significant market power, which carried a 40% premium on the reserve price in both bands. That set its minimum at US$33.6 million per 3 GHz lot, against US$24 million for other applicants. MTN’s fee works out at about US$33.7 million per lot.

No rival at 700 MHz

In the 700 MHz band, which the NCA describes as suited to wide-area and rural coverage, MTN was the only qualified applicant. It applied for 2 of the 3 lots, the maximum one applicant could hold, and the NCA concluded the band on 11 September 2026.

MTN’s fee is US$100,000 above its premium-adjusted reserve of US$50.4 million per lot. The third lot drew no applications.

What comes with it

The licence terms oblige an operator with significant market power to offer national roaming to every other licensed mobile operator in Ghana, at non-discriminatory prices set at cost and approved by the NCA, or at the regulated tariff. MTN must file a reference offer within 90 days of the licence taking effect, and roaming must be available within 6 months.

MTN says it will add the spectrum to its existing holdings to expand capacity, grow 5G mobility and connect homes to broadband.

The round followed the NCA’s decision in July to end Next-Gen InfraCo’s monopoly on wholesale 5G, after the shared network had built 49 of a planned 4,400 sites, and its call for applications a day later. Four companies applied. Telecel Ghana and Goal Telecommunications qualified alongside MTN; Infrava did not.

Telecel Ghana said on 17 September 2026 that the NCA had awarded it 3 lots in the 2.3 GHz band, all those it applied for, a total of 60 MHz. “This award is an important step in our preparations for the rollout of 5G,” said Komla Buami, its director of external affairs.

Telecel’s statement did not mention the 3 GHz band or disclose a fee. Goal Telecommunications, which applied for 1 lot in the 2.3 GHz band, has not announced an outcome, and the NCA has not yet published final results for either band.

Correction, 7 October 2026: This article originally stated that the outcome in the 2.3 GHz band was still to be announced. Telecel Ghana said on 17 September 2026 that the NCA had awarded it 3 lots in the band.

The companies said on 1 October 2026 that the mechanism had completed its first year of commercial operation, from 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026. Vodacom says it was the first company in South Africa to run commercial virtual wheeling at scale.

How it works

Conventional wheeling links one generator to one buyer. Virtual wheeling pools a buyer’s consumption across many sites and matches it with renewable generation. That suits Vodacom, which has more than 15,000 low-voltage sites spread across 168 licensed municipalities, as well as sites supplied directly by Eskom.

Mezzanine, a majority-owned Vodacom subsidiary, handles the data side; its platform aggregates consumption across the sites and reconciles it with what the producers generate. Eskom then checks Vodacom’s monthly claims before paying the refund.

“This first anniversary represents far more than a year of successful monthly refunds. It is proof that our collaborative efforts have resulted in a workable, scalable solution for the country,” said Vodacom chief executive Sitho Mdlalose.

What was not disclosed

Neither company said how much electricity has been wheeled or what the refunds are worth. Vodacom also did not say how far the arrangement has taken it towards its goal of sourcing all of its electricity from renewable sources.

The agreement was signed in 2023 and needed 2 years of technical and regulatory work before commercial operation began. Vodacom presents it as a blueprint for other large businesses with many sites. Wheeling is also being used to move power to South Africa’s growing data centres.

In May, the GSMA warned that fuel costs put African mobile networks at risk, because many rely on diesel backup at their sites.

The operator said on 29 September 2026 that it had piloted an integrated passive-active Massive MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) solution with Nokia in the Western Cape, and would now deploy it at “identified sites” on its existing network where more capacity is needed. It did not say how many sites, over what period, or how much capacity the pilot added.

What Vodacom tested

Massive MIMO uses large arrays of antenna elements to serve many users at once on the same spectrum. The solution Vodacom piloted runs it across the 2600 MHz and 3500 MHz bands and combines several antenna functions in one compact unit, so it can go on towers and rooftops where space or existing structures rule out conventional expansion.

“As demand for mobile data continues to grow, we need to continuously evolve our network to deliver the quality and consistency of experience our customers expect,” said Beverly Ngwenya, technology director at Vodacom South Africa.

Vodacom says the benefit is greatest in high-demand urban areas, where physical space is limited and conventional network expansion is more complex. Vodacom says it also lets it use its spectrum more efficiently. Further mobile bands are set out in ICASA’s spectrum roadmap to 2030.

What the “world first” covers

Vodacom calls the solution a world first. The integrated passive-active design itself is not new: antenna maker RFS and Nokia launched one in March 2023, but its first version carried Massive MIMO in a single band, 3.5 GHz, alongside a passive module for the lower bands.

Vodacom’s claim rests on running Massive MIMO in 2 bands within the same compact unit. It did not name the product.

Massive MIMO itself is not new to Vodacom. The group deployed it in 2018, when it launched a commercial 5G service in Lesotho and a trial 5G network in South Africa, both on 3.5 GHz.

PwC’s Global Data Centre Outlook 2026-50, published on 2 September 2026 and modelled with Oxford Economics, projects $255 billion of cumulative data centre capital spending in Africa by 2050 in its central scenario. That is a small slice of the $31.6 trillion it forecasts worldwide, and slightly below Africa’s share of global GDP.

Not a bet on AI

What sets Africa apart is what the money buys. “Africa is the only region in this forecast whose central scenario isn’t a bet on AI,” the report says. “The region is largely buying foundational digital infrastructure that pays off regardless of which AI scenario plays out.”

PwC calls that “one of the lowest-risk capex stories on the map”. South Africa anchors the market with the most established data centre base, and Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are named as the most promising emerging markets. Kenya stands out for a grid that is about 95% renewable.

A range from $193bn to $284bn

The central figure hides a wide spread. In a scenario built around tighter export controls on advanced chips, Africa’s cumulative spending falls to $193 billion. The continent is not a direct target of those controls, but PwC says its limited semiconductor depth and weaker access to advanced equipment mean it absorbs a meaningful share of the knock-on disruption.

In a second scenario, governments and regulated industries become less willing to rely on foreign infrastructure for essential workloads such as public services, financial systems and healthcare. Global spending barely moves, but it shifts towards markets with strong domestic demand and too little capacity. Africa records “the largest proportional uplift of any region”, rising about 12% to $284 billion.

That argument is already live in markets such as Nigeria, where local cloud has become a test of digital sovereignty.

Power decides where it lands

“In every region, the same underlying rule holds: power is the binding constraint,” the report says, and policy determines how quickly it can be supplied. In South Africa, that is already visible in the transmission build behind the data centre boom.

PwC’s separate infrastructure outlook, which put South Africa’s total infrastructure spending at $582 billion by 2050, includes about $71 billion of digital infrastructure, Jarendra Reddy, PwC South Africa’s capital projects and infrastructure leader, wrote on 28 September 2026. He argues that data centres must now be planned alongside power, water and connectivity rather than on their own.