Nigerian telecoms firm and leading data center provider MainOne has announced plans to expand its data center footprint across West Africa, intending to double its storage capacity through its MDXi data center subsidiary.
Emmanuel Kwarteng, MainOne Ghana country manager, affirmed that the company will increase the capacity of its data centers from around 700 racks to 900 racks next year. By 2023, an additional 300 racks will also be added to cater to the growing demand in the market.
“We see the data center market growing a lot in Ghana and Nigeria, with demand from financial institutions, manufacturers, oil and gas companies, and enterprises,” he said.
To explain, MDXi is a carrier-neutral data center infrastructure that harnesses MainOne’s network footprint to interconnect all major network providers in the region as well as enable smaller ISPs and virtual network operators to connect to the data center facilities.
Later this year, MainOne’s 130-rack facility in Lagos will be finished and opened for services. It also plans to add a 50-rack center in Cote d’Ivoire in 2022. Looking back, in December 2019, MainOne’s submarine cable in Cote d’Ivoire went live, which is known as the first commercial cable system in service to deploy spectrum sharing capabilities.
Moreover, MainOne will expand its 104-rack Ghana facility to 400 racks in two years’ time and strategically extend its services to more countries including Liberia over the next three years. The expansion of data center capacity will deliberately help fulfill the government mandate of local data storing in primary and backup facilities. The undersea cable and broadband connectivity provider has already constructed terrestrial fiber and interconnection facilities in close to ten West African countries.
