Africa's data centre market is moving fast. Billions of dollars are flowing in from American real estate investment trusts, Gulf sovereign funds, and global cloud giants. South Africa is leading. Kenya is accelerating. Nigeria is emerging. And the facilities being built right now are larger, more powerful, and more strategically significant than anything the continent has seen before.

Here are the four biggest ones operating today.

1. Teraco Isando Campus — Johannesburg, South Africa

South Africa's largest data centre is the Isando Campus, built by Teraco, with 70MW of IT load capacity. It is also the largest operational data centre on the entire African continent.

Teraco is not only the largest data centre in Africa but one of the most efficient in the world. It is a major interconnection point through its Africa Cloud Exchange service, which connects directly to major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Teraco was acquired by Digital Realty, an American real estate investment trust, in 2021. In November 2024, it began construction of a new facility called JB7 with 40MW IT load capacity, featuring liquid-to-air and liquid-to-liquid cooling specifically designed for AI workloads. When JB7 is complete, the Isando campus will extend its lead as the continent's dominant data centre operation.

Teraco's partnership with NVIDIA through the DGX-Ready programme reflects strong enterprise interest in robust AI infrastructure. Altron's operational AI Factory, hosted at Teraco and powered by NVIDIA, offers clients access to comprehensive AI tools and infrastructure while ensuring data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.

It is the backbone of digital infrastructure in Southern Africa. Everything else on this list is chasing it.

2. Africa Data Centres — Johannesburg, South Africa

With 120MW of capacity, Africa Data Centres in Johannesburg is equipped with world-class infrastructure designed for maximum scalability to meet ever-increasing demand.

On paper, this facility has more raw capacity than Teraco. In practice, not all of that capacity is currently active at AI workload density, which is why Teraco still holds the operational lead in terms of AI-ready infrastructure. But Africa Data Centres is expanding aggressively.

The company is backed by Cassava Technologies, which is itself majority-owned by West Street Capital Partners, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. Cassava Technologies has announced plans to deploy 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs across South Africa, with expansion planned to Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco using NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference architectures.

Africa Data Centres is one of the major operators positioning South Africa as the continent's leading cloud and AI infrastructure hub, alongside Teraco, NTT Data, and Vantage Data Centres. The GPU deployment plan makes it one of the most AI-forward operations on the continent right now.

3. IXAfrica — Nairobi, Kenya

IXAfrica is East Africa's first hyperscale, carrier-neutral, AI-ready data centre. It is the most significant AI infrastructure facility in the entire East African region and it is still growing.

IXAfrica has secured up to $200 million in debt funding to expand its Nairobi facility to 53MW capacity. That funding figure alone signals how seriously international investors are treating Kenya's position as a regional digital hub.

What makes IXAfrica strategically interesting is the carrier-neutral model. Unlike facilities tied to a single cloud provider or telco, IXAfrica allows multiple operators to interconnect, which makes it more useful for a wider range of clients and more resilient as a piece of national infrastructure.

Kenya's broader AI data centre ambitions are significant. Microsoft and UAE-based G42 announced a $1 billion investment package for Kenya, including a data centre for Microsoft Azure's East Africa Cloud Region and development of Swahili and English large language AI models. IXAfrica sits at the centre of that ecosystem.

4. Rack Centre — Lagos, Nigeria

Rack Centre secured $100 million to fund an expansion targeting 30MW across Lagos and Abuja, which will make it West Africa's largest data centre when complete.

Tier III certified, Rack Centre is home to a wide range of companies from local startups to multinationals. Its recent expansion project has doubled its capacity, enabling it to meet the growing demand for digital services in West Africa.

Nigeria's data centre story is complicated by one persistent problem: power. Nigeria's grid has never exceeded 6GW for a population of 230 million people.

Rack Centre, like every other data centre operator in Nigeria, has had to build its own power resilience into the facility rather than relying on the national grid.

But the market opportunity is undeniable. Nigeria is emerging as Africa's fastest-growing data centre investment market, with investments projected to increase from $132 million in 2025 to nearly $770 million by 2031, driven by rising cloud adoption and digital infrastructure expansion. Rack Centre is the facility best positioned to capture that growth in the near term.

Conclusion

These four facilities represent where Africa's AI infrastructure stands today. South Africa dominates by capacity and maturity. Kenya is building the most ambitious AI-ready facilities. Nigeria is the fastest-growing market but still constrained by power.

Africa's data centre demand is projected to grow to about 1.5 to 2.2 gigawatts by 2030. Right now, the entire continent's operational capacity is a fraction of that figure. The gap between where Africa is and where it needs to be is also the size of the opportunity, and the reason billions of foreign dollars are arriving on the continent right now to fill it.