African data centers, the infrastructure needed to ensure the continent’s digital sovereignty, are still in short supply. Senegal, Morocco, DRC, Ivory Coast … which countries are doing well? Who is lagging behind? The state of the game in infographics.

What would happen if Ireland or the Netherlands, the two data hosting countries of many African countries, one day decided to cut off access to their data centers? Millions of Africans and millions of businesses will lose their valuable data overnight. If this seems extreme, then this theory is not impossible, because governments on the continent have lagged behind in the deployment of their digital infrastructure due to lack of investment or political will.

In the age of the “cloud” all digitization, the location of infrastructure that stores and processes millions of gigabytes of data is a strategic issue. These storage centers – or data centers – focus on digital information produced by private or public entities. Sometimes stored internally on one or two servers (large hard drives with a storage capacity of several gigabytes), they can be transferred to a data center of hundreds of square meters, which is extremely secure and contains thousands of servers.

Acceleration

By hosting their data outside their borders, African nations are relinquishing part of their political, economic, and digital sovereignty. Fortunately, as the data center region on the continent grows and international players increase investment in favor of better connectivity in Africa, the trend of taking this information home seems to have confirmed.

Africa Data Centers, the Rockio Group, the Rock Center or Main One, African or foreign capital but groups set aside only for the continent, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the past three years. Objective: To support their construction plans From nothingness Acquisition of infrastructure or existing infrastructure.

While this seems to be accelerating even in Morocco, Senegal, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and the DRC, this development is not uniform. Which are the most developed countries? Who is lagging behind? What is the weight of African data centers? Then who owns it? All answers are in infographics.