Orange Inaugurates €23 Million Disaster Recovery Data Center in Sierra Leone
December 8, 2025
In a significant move to bolster digital resilience in West Africa, telecommunications giant Orange has inaugurated a new backup data center in Sierra Leone. The launch underscores the growing imperative for robust digital infrastructure in emerging markets, where reliable data services are crucial for economic development and societal connectivity.
The new facility, located in Bo City, represents an investment of €23 million (approximately $26.7 million) and serves as a full-scale disaster recovery hub for Orange Sierra Leone's primary data center in the capital, Freetown. The company's local CEO, Sekou Amadou Bah, emphasized the strategic importance of the project, stating, "We are a trusted digital partner to Sierra Leone. With this center, we aim to power digital innovation across Bo District and beyond." The inauguration ceremony was attended by Sierra Leone's President, Julius Maada Bio, who hailed the data center as a "significant milestone" in the nation's digital transformation journey.
The Bo data center is designed as an exact replica of the Freetown site, which launched in 2018. The primary facility spans 940 square meters (10,118 square feet) with a 350-square-meter (3,767-square-foot) technical area housing capacity for 154 racks. By establishing this geographically separate backup site, Orange aims to ensure that emergencies, outages, or natural disasters do not disrupt critical digital services across the country.
This expansion is part of Orange's broader footprint across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, where it operates approximately 75 data centers. In Africa alone, its portfolio includes facilities in Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Egypt, Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Jordan, and Burkina Faso. The Sierra Leone operation falls under the Sonatel Group, in which Orange holds a 42 percent stake. The move aligns with the group's recent strategic shift to more actively leverage and potentially open up its data center assets to third-party clients, mirroring its approach to telecom tower sharing, though the company has stated its objective is "not to sell these assets for cash."
Source: datacenterdynamics
Orange Inaugurates €23 Million Disaster Recovery Data Center in Sierra Leone
