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By Chinenye Anuforo
Open Access Data Centres (OADC) is positioning itself at the forefront of Africa’s next digital growth phase, using strategic expansion and infrastructure scale to target the continent’s accelerating demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence capacity.
The company’s acquisition of seven NTT data centres in South Africa, following regulatory approval, marks more than a routine footprint increase. It reflected a calculated bet that Africa’s digital economy is entering a new era defined by hyperscale cloud adoption, AI-driven workloads and the urgent need for resilient, interconnected infrastructure.
By adding the seven facilities, OADC’s South African capacity now exceeds 25 megawatts, significantly strengthening its presence in the continent’s most mature data-centre market and creating a dense regional platform capable of supporting enterprise cloud migration, fintech expansion, streaming growth and emerging AI applications.
Industry analysts view the move as part of a broader continental shift in which leading operators are racing to assemble multi-country infrastructure networks rather than isolated national sites. In this environment, geographic redundancy, interconnection capability and operational scale are becoming decisive competitive advantages as global technology companies seek reliable African partners for long-term deployment.
With existing operations spanning South Africa, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, OADC is increasingly emerging as a pan-African infrastructure player, an evolution that aligns with the needs of cloud providers and multinational enterprises seeking consistent service delivery across multiple African regions.
Chief Executive Officer of OADC, Dr. Ayotunde Coker, described the acquisition as a major step toward expanding scalable and resilient colocation capacity while deepening the company’s contribution to Africa’s digital transformation. He said the enlarged platform will enable geographically separated primary and disaster-recovery environments, allowing businesses to operate with higher reliability as dependence on digital services intensifies.
Beyond immediate capacity gains, the deal underscores confidence in long-term growth drivers reshaping Africa’s technology landscape. Rapid urban connectivity, expanding mobile broadband use, rising enterprise cloud adoption and the early emergence of AI-enabled services are collectively driving unprecedented demand for secure, energy-efficient data-centre infrastructure.
OADC’s plan to enhance the acquired facilities with advanced operational efficiency and reliability measures also reflects the sector’s transition toward performance-optimised infrastructure capable of sustaining continuous uptime and energy-intensive computing workloads.
The expansion comes at a time when Africa’s data-centre sector is drawing increasing global attention, with investors and technology firms recognising the continent as one of the last major frontiers for large-scale digital infrastructure growth. Control of resilient, interconnected facilities is therefore becoming strategically significant not only for commercial advantage but for shaping how and where Africa’s digital economy evolves.
Seen in this context, OADC’s South African acquisition represents a forward-looking wager on the technologies expected to define the next decade of economic transformation. As cloud services deepen and AI adoption accelerates across industries, the operators building continental-scale infrastructure today are likely to determine who captures the value of Africa’s digital future tomorrow.
