US firm to invest sh186b in East African data centres
Nov 21, 2018
Robert Mullins, the Executive Director at First Brick Holdings said the planned $50m (about sh186b) data centres by 2022, will open up new opportunities for financial services, governments and small to medium enterprises (SMEs).
First Brick Holdings, a Roha Group company has announced plans for multiple investments to boost the digitalisation of East and Southern Africa with the funding and development of several data centres across the region.
The announcement was made at the sidelines of the recently concluded AfricaCom Digital Week in Cape Town, South Africa. AfricaCom is an African tech and telecoms event which brings together the converging industries and innovations shaping Africa's digital future.
Robert Mullins, the Executive Director at First Brick Holdings said the planned $50m (about sh186b) data centres by 2022, will open up new opportunities for financial services, governments and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) by addressing their mission-critical needs for data storage.
He added that the centres will also improve business continuity and disaster recovery and create a network of data centres able to accommodate international and regional customers in state-of-the-art facilities "Economic growth in East Africa is averaging between 5-10% across the region.
"When combined with parallel trends in digitalization and content consumption, we are seeing annual data usage and associated storage requirements increasing by 20-30 percent," Mullins said.
First Brick Holdings' initial investment is in Uganda, where it is setting up a state-of-the-art Tier III, carrier-neutral data centre in the Namanve Industrial and Business Park. The centre is due to open mid-2019 with up to 400 racks, delivering 1.5MW of IT power.
James Byaruhanga, General Manager, Raxio Data said that data centres are needed as the key pillar to Uganda's digital economy, reducing the cost of connectivity in the country and attracting global cloud service providers, content distribution networks and regional carriers.
"Data centre installations in East Africa are lagging behind other emerging economies, despite the region facing similar underlying trends in terms of the growth of data usage and storage requirements," Byaruhanga said.