Facility will offer 4.5MW of capacity
South African telco MTN has launched the first phase of its data center in Nigeria.
The telco operates in Nigeria as MTN Nigeria and is mostly focused on consumer offerings.
The facility, called the Dabengwa Sifiso Data Centre after a former MTN CEO, is located in Lagos, Nigeria. The first phase offers 4.5MW of capacity across 780 racks, while a second phase could see capacity increased to between 14MW-20MW, said Roger Shute, GM for infrastructure at MTN.
Phase I has been designed to Uptime Tier III standards.
According to Techpoint Africa, MTN said that demand would determine whether the facility’s second phase gets built. Yahaya Ibrahim, MTN Nigeria’s CTO, said that both phases would be valued at $235m.
In addition to launching the data center, MTN has said that it will be offering a local cloud service from the facility, and has thus far invested $20 million in cloud infrastructure at the site.
Few cloud providers have a presence in Nigeria. Amazon Web Services operates an Edge network location in Lagos, and last December, Huawei launched a cloud region in the city.
Most of Nigeria’s data centers are based in Lagos. Operators include Equinix, Digital Realty, Nxtra, OADC, ADC, and Rack Centre.
MTN is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has a strong presence across Africa. It recently announced that it would retire its South African 3G network by the end of 2026, and the company made its exit from Afghanistan in April.
