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Rack Centre

Region: West Africa Investment date: March 2020 Sector: Real Estate Exit date: Deal type: Buy and Build Status date: Current

Rack Centre is the leading carrier neutral data centre operator in West Africa, hosting over 80 international, regional and local clients. With over 40 carriers connecting to the facility, as well as hosting Nigeria’s internet exchange, Rack Centre is the most connected facility in the region and links every country on Africa’s Atlantic coast. It’s carrier neutrality allows customers to manage traffic to get better value, lower latency and higher resilience, and creates an open market for partnerships between customers, networks, cloud and content providers, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria and managed service providers.

Rack Centre clients include over 40 telecommunication carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), global Tier 1 networks and pan Africa international carriers, including direct connection to all 5 undersea cables serving the South Atlantic Coast of Africa and every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa.

Rack Centre is part of a US$250m buy and build platform established by Actis in March 2020, comprising of independently owned, carrier neutral, data centres aimed at catering to carrier, cloud and hyperscale customers across key African markets.

With 138 million Internet subscribers, more than any country in Africa or Europe, and the largest population and GDP in Africa, Nigeria is a key entry point for global telecommunications, content and cloud players seeking access to the region.  However, a lack of cost effective, energy efficient IT infrastructure has been a constraint to doing business in the region.  Rack Centre brings global best practice to Nigeria, as the first carrier neutral data centre in the region to achieve Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF). As a uniquely scale carrier neutral player, Rack Centre allows unrestricted connectivity between customers, telecommunication carriers and internet exchange points within its data centres.

https://www.ft.com/content/402a18c8-5a32-11ea-abe5-8e03987b7b20

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