Pan African Internet Exchange (PAIX) is looking to grow Africa’s Data Center and carrier neutral facilities in the region, to match some of Europe’s biggest providers.

In February this year, PAIX completed its first major investment, West Africa Data Centres Ltd (WADC), Ghana. Just three months later, PAIX announced that it agreed terms with NSIA Technologies to jointly develop and operate carrier neutral data centres under the PAIX brand in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and Dakar, Senegal.

“We at PAIX are investing to address this opportunity, and as this is a very large continent, we cannot do this alone, so we are partnering with companies with a vested interest in the development of the African market,” says CEO Wouter van Hulten.

According to a report by the Broad Group that assessed 16 markets, Africa has 74 players with 91 data centers and total power availability estimated at 90.8MW.

“Data Centers are a relatively new feature of the ICT ecosystem across the African continent. As infrastructure slowly continues to develop, new facilities offering third party hosting and IT outsourcing are evolving,” said Wouter.

Broadband in Africa is booming – the region is consistently recording the highest broadband growth rates in the world and expected to continue doing so, albeit off a small starting base.

Africa’s population is young and hungry for knowledge and information (data) and will consume all that can be given at an economic price. Investment in fibre, sub-marine cables, 4G and satellites are all happening. But hardly any investment is happening in data centres, particularly in independent (carrier and vendor neutral), internet exchange focused data centres.

PAIX Data Centres has set out to meet this demand.  As a Pan-African provider of cloud and carrier neutral colocation data centre services, headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, it aims to offer a leading global quality service level to its national and international customer base across the African continent.

“A carrier neutral facility presents a revenue opportunity for businesses because of the possibility to interconnection with business partners, and form communities of interest.  As regulatory environments and governance develops, the markets enjoy lower cost of bandwidth, allowing accelerated social and economic growth.”

PAIX is a silver sponsor at this year’s AfPIF2018@iWeek which is being held in Cape Town, South Africa. “We are looking forward to this year’s event, where we will meet network operators, CDNs and decision makers looking for expansion and better data centers options. We invite those considering data centre expansion in Africa to discuss with us, please contact al.scott@paix.io.”