Africa data centre growth 2026: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt

Africa has a small but fast growing data centre base. A July 2026 industry report puts operating capacity at more than 500 megawatts, with about 890 megawatts in development, and South Africa holds over 60 percent of what runs today. Other counts differ, so check what each figure measures.

Key numbers at a glance

• Africa, operational data centre capacity: more than 500 MW (Fortren and Company report, reported by Nairametrics and BusinessDay, 27 and 28 July 2026).
• Africa, capacity in development: about 890 MW (same report).
• South Africa, share of operational capacity: over 60 percent (same report).
• Largest single facility: Teraco Isando campus, Johannesburg, 70 MW of IT capacity (same report).
• Nigeria, Ikeja campus of 21st Century Technologies: 36 MW of IT capacity, ranked fourth (same report).
• Ghana, Agility Logistics Park campus: 30 MW committed, designed to expand to 150 MW (same report).
• Egypt, East Cairo Logistics Park campus: 25 MW, designed to scale to 45 MW (same report).
• Lagos, current capacity: 78.6 MW, projected over 218 MW by 2030 (Estate Intel, Lagos pipeline report 2025/2026, as relayed in July 2026).
• Number of data centres in Africa, February 2026: 249 or 282 depending on the article, from Data Centre Map as published by Intelpoint.
• South Africa, number of facilities: 61 (Intelpoint, February 2026).
• Nigeria, number of facilities: 25, of which 21 are in Lagos (Intelpoint, February 2026).
• Kenya, IT load capacity: about 40 MW, projected growth of 30 percent a year through 2028 (African Energy Chamber, February 2026).
• Africa, active IT load: 360 MW, with 238 MW under construction and 656 MW more planned (Africa Data Centres Association and Rising Advisory report, 24 February 2026, as reported by Kapitalis).
• Africa, share of global data centre capacity: 0.6 percent (same report).
• South Africa, days without load shedding: 518 consecutive, since 16 May 2025 (Eskom statement, 16 October 2026).

Terms first

A megawatt (MW) measures electrical power. Data centre capacity is quoted in megawatts because power, not floor space, limits how much computing a site can do.

IT capacity or IT load means the power available to servers, storage and networking. Total or installed capacity also includes cooling and other support equipment, so it is larger. Design capacity is the maximum a site could reach when fully built, not what is switched on today. Committed capacity is a portion a builder has promised to build, usually for named customers. You will see all four in one article, often side by side.

A hyperscaler is a very large cloud provider. A colocation operator rents space, power and cooling to many customers. An availability zone is a separate data centre location within a cloud region.

Why two sources can both be right and still disagree

The Fortren report talks about capacity in megawatts. Intelpoint counts buildings. Estate Intel counts a single city. They are not interchangeable.

Even two capacity reports can disagree. The Africa Data Centres Association (ADCA) and Rising Advisory report, published on 24 February 2026 and summarised by Kapitalis the next day, puts active IT load across the continent at 360 MW, with 238 MW under construction and a further 656 MW planned, about 1.2 GW in total if every project is completed. Fortren, five months later, says more than 500 MW is operating. The gap may reflect timing, the inclusion of different sites, or the difference between IT load and total facility power. Neither report, as summarised, sets out its full method, so both figures are shown here.

Intelpoint itself shows the problem. In February 2026 it published two articles from the same data set, Data Centre Map. One said Africa had 282 data centres and South Africa held about 22 percent. The other said 249 and 25 percent. Both gave 61 facilities for South Africa. The count of countries with only one data centre also differed, with 18 in one and "a dozen" in the other. Intelpoint did not explain the difference, so both numbers are shown here. The takeaway that holds in both is that South Africa leads on count, followed by Nigeria with 25 and Kenya with 19, and that many countries have only a handful.

Building counts also hide size. One large campus can hold more power than twenty small rooms. That is why the capacity figure is more useful for comparing countries, and the count is more useful for judging how many places a customer can choose from.

South Africa: the mature market

South Africa holds more than 60 percent of operating capacity, according to the Fortren report relayed by Nairametrics. It also holds four of the seven largest facilities, including the largest in Africa, Teraco's Isando campus at 70 MW of IT capacity, and Africa Data Centres' JHB1 in Midrand at 20 MW.

The African Energy Chamber, in a February 2026 outlook, described South Africa as Africa's most mature market, with cloud zones from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services and Google expected to follow, activity centred on Johannesburg and Cape Town, and utilisation above 83 percent, projected to exceed 94 percent by 2030. High utilisation means little spare space. It is a sign of demand, but also of a limit if new supply is slow.

One caution. An industry overview by Channelwise (28 November 2025) says Johannesburg capacity would double from 400 MW to 800 MW and reach 1.3 GW by 2027. That page states it cites no external sources and has an apparent typo in the starting figure, so the figure is not relied on here. It is shown only so you know the claim exists. If you are planning around it, ask operators.

Baker McKenzie, in a June 2026 note on South Africa, gives a sense of scale. It says IT load for the largest operator alone sat near 190 MW in the first quarter of 2026, and that recently announced expansion plans could push national IT load past 1,200 MW, which it describes as roughly equal to one stage of load shedding. Load shedding is Eskom's term for planned rotating power cuts, applied in numbered stages when supply cannot meet demand. The comparison is a way to say that the planned data centre build is large relative to the margins South Africa has lived with.

Nigeria: Lagos as the centre

Nigeria is second on building count, with 25, and Lagos hosts 21 of them (84 percent), Abuja 12 percent and Kano 4 percent, according to Intelpoint. Live capacity in Nigeria was led by Rack Centre at 13.5 MW across two centres, with Africa Data Centres at 10 MW and Equinix at 8.8 MW, in the same Intelpoint article. These figures come from a different source and date than Fortren, so they do not add up directly. The Fortren report names the 21st Century Technologies Ikeja campus at 36 MW of IT capacity, ranked fourth in Africa.

Estate Intel, as relayed in July 2026, puts Lagos at 78.6 MW now and over 218 MW by 2030. Three projects named in that report:

• 21st Century Technologies, Ikeja: a 50 MW project.
• Airtel, through its Nxtra business, in Eko Atlantic: a 38 MW project.
• Open Access Data Centres, Ilasan: a 24 MW campus.

Estate Intel said installed capacity was growing faster than use, but it considered the market balanced because data centres are long term investments. Analysts quoted in BusinessDay said continued growth in Nigeria depends on electricity supply, fibre connectivity and policies that attract cloud providers.

Kenya and East Africa

The African Energy Chamber puts Kenya at about 40 MW of IT load capacity, calling it East Africa's fastest growing hub with a projected 30 percent annual growth rate through 2028, and said the Konza National Data Centre, part of Kenya's Vision 2030, is expected to lift total supply beyond 155 MW by 2029. Fortren lists an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure project in Kenya among projects in development, with no megawatt figure given. Intelpoint counts 19 facilities in Kenya.

Channelwise also lists an AI ready campus in Nairobi with 22.5 MW design capacity and a planned 100 MW project in Kenya by a G42 related business, scaling toward 1 GW. As above, that page cites no sources, so confirm with the operators before relying on those numbers.

Egypt, Ghana and the next wave

Fortren's list shows a spread beyond South Africa. Ghana's Agility Logistics Park has 30 MW committed with a design ceiling of 150 MW. Egypt's East Cairo Logistics Park has 25 MW with plans for 45 MW, and Khazna Data Centers, the UAE based operator linked to G42, is named as a project in development in Egypt without a stated size. Ethiopia and Morocco are named as emerging markets with no capacity figures.

The Gulf link matters. The Gulf states are building at home at gigawatt scale, as set out in Gulf AI data centres compared, and operators from there are appearing in North and East African pipelines. Whether those projects are built on time is something to verify project by project.

Power is the story

African Energy Chamber executive chairman NJ Ayuk is quoted in the February 2026 release saying data centres are "no longer just a technology story" and are an energy story as well. The release said data centres can be stable, long term anchor customers for grids, but that electricity supply is uneven in many countries, with outages and limited redundancy affecting resilience.

Redundancy means having a backup so that a single failure does not take the site down. A data centre that must run its own generators for long periods costs more and carries more risk. This is why the pipeline figures matter less than whether each project has a firm power contract. The general case is covered in how long it takes to build an AI data centre.

The ADCA report, as summarised by Kapitalis, makes the same point from the operators' side. It says energy supply, not fibre connectivity, is now the main constraint on new sites, and that power deficits and transmission losses of up to 25 percent in some urban centres are pushing operators toward long term power purchase agreements, microgrids and siting next to renewable generation. A power purchase agreement, or PPA, is a contract to buy electricity from a specific generator at an agreed price for many years. A microgrid is a local network of generation and storage that can run on its own when the main grid fails.

South Africa shows how fast the power picture can change. Eskom, the state utility, said on 16 October 2026 that it had gone 518 consecutive days without load shedding, counted from 16 May 2025, and that its energy availability factor, the share of its fleet able to produce power, reached 68.2 percent for 1 April to 15 October 2026, which it called its highest level in six years. It reported 5,695 MW of surplus capacity on that day. These are the utility's own figures. They describe a recovery, not a guarantee, and an operator planning a campus will still want backup generation and a clear route to grid capacity. For the detail on Eskom, wheeling and private power, see South Africa data centres, Eskom and wheeling.

Outside South Africa, the ADCA report says average occupancy is close to one third of available capacity, which it attributes to facilities built ahead of expected demand from hyperscale cloud providers and AI. Low occupancy means space exists but customers have not yet moved in. Connectivity also matters here; the cable routes that link these sites to the rest of the world are covered in Africa's subsea cables in 2026.

The Chamber release also gave a global figure that is easy to misread. It forecast uninterruptible power supply capacity for data centres of 249 GW by 2030 and total installed capacity of 374 GW. Those are world figures, not African ones, and the number 249 coincides with the Intelpoint building count, which is unrelated. Do not mix them.

Why this matters for customers and software teams

Data sovereignty rules. The AEC release said that data sovereignty requirements mean Africa cannot rely only on European data centres, so global providers are opening local operations. The ADCA report, as summarised by Kapitalis, adds that more than 40 African countries have data protection laws and 15 have national AI strategies, and that Africa holds about 20 percent of the world's population but about 0.6 percent of global data centre capacity. For the difference between residency and sovereignty, see data residency vs sovereignty vs localisation.

Choice and concentration. If most capacity is in one country, and in Nigeria's case mostly in one city, then outages, floods or grid problems in that place affect many customers at once. If your service has African users, ask which sites you depend on.

Supply chain. Every new site brings new management software, network firmware and monitoring tools. Teams building or running services there should keep an inventory of what they run. Build costs are covered in AI data centre cost per megawatt and per gigawatt.

What is firm and what is uncertain

Firm, in the sense that more than one source reports it:

• South Africa dominates operating capacity and building count.
• Nigeria and Kenya are the next largest by building count, and Lagos is Nigeria's hub.
• Capacity in development is large relative to what operates today.

Uncertain:

• The count of African data centres, 249 or 282.
• Many planned figures are design capacities or announcements, not capacity in service.
• The Fortren, Estate Intel and Intelpoint figures use different definitions and dates and are secondary reports, not operator or regulator data.
• Total operating capacity: more than 500 MW (Fortren, July 2026) against 360 MW active IT load (ADCA, February 2026).
• Single source claims on Johannesburg doubling and Kenyan projects from an outlet that cited no sources.
• A reliable current figure for capacity by country outside South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya has not been published in the reports cited here.
• Whether South Africa's run without load shedding holds as large new loads connect.

What to watch next

• Operator announcements that Airtel's Lagos site and the 21st Century Technologies Ikeja expansion are energised.
• Progress on Konza in Kenya and any Oracle megawatt figure.
• Updates to the Fortren pipeline of 890 MW, and what share is under construction.
• Power purchase agreements and grid connection rules in the largest markets.
• A cleaner public count of facilities from a single maintained source.
• Eskom's weekly statements on load shedding, surplus capacity and the March 2027 target for ending load reduction.
• Occupancy outside South Africa, which the ADCA put near one third in February 2026.

Quick check

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Sources

• Africa's data centre capacity exceeds 500 MW with 890 MW in pipeline, Nairametrics, 27 July 2026
• Investors pour into Africa's digital backbone as data centre projects near 900 MW, BusinessDay, 28 July 2026
• South Africa accounts for 22 percent of Africa's 282 data centres, Intelpoint, February 2026
• South Africa accounts for 25 percent of Africa's 249 data centres, Intelpoint, February 2026
• Data centres set to transform Africa's power market, African Energy Chamber release in Windhoek Express, 9 February 2026
• The African data centre landscape, Channelwise, 28 November 2025 (cites no external sources)
• Kapitalis on the ADCA and Rising Advisory report, 25 February 2026
• Eskom media statement, 16 October 2026
• Baker McKenzie, South Africa: the megawatt and the token, 11 June 2026

Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.