Pan-African operator Airtel Africa has announced the launch in Africa of Nxtra by Airtel, a data centre business.
Nxtra aims to build one of the largest network of data centres in Africa with high-capacity data centres in major cities located strategically across Airtel Africa’s footprint, complementing its existing edge sites.
Airtel says that Nxtra’s ambition will allow it to serve the growing needs of African enterprises and that its data centre infrastructure will be designed to host the next generation of computing, while providing multi-MW capacity in a phased manner.
These facilities will meet stringent global security requirements and offer ‘five nines’ (99.999%) availability. Coupled with Airtel Africa’s extensive fibre footprint, Nxtra says it will offer secure and scalable integrated solutions to global hyperscalers, large African enterprises, start-ups, SMEs and governments, as it already does in India.
As well as enabling locally available data centre capacity, which means speed to access digital services will improve and the cost of managing data will be reduced, Nxtra is enabling customers meet data sovereignty requirements and enabling more local cloud services to be offered in the countries where Airtel Africa operates.
The first major Nxtra facility, in Lagos, Nigeria, will deliver 34 MW of total power. It is designed to host high-density racks and integrate the latest best practice construction to achieve 1.3 power usage effectiveness (PUE). It is expected to be live in mid-2025.