Adil El Youssefi, Chief Executive Officer, Africa Data Centres
When people think about digital infrastructure in Africa, they often picture the new subsea cables landing on our shores. And those cables, including 2Africa, Equiano, and PEACE, are indeed headline-grabbing. But the real story is less about who lands the biggest pipe and more about what happens once the data comes onshore. That story is about latency, and right now, Africa is in a quiet but critical race to shape its latency future.
Latency is about far more than speed. It’s about the cost of delivery, the reliability of services, and how willing users are to stay engaged. A few hundred milliseconds of delay doesn’t sound like much, until you realise that an e-commerce site hosted overseas can take up to 1,000 milliseconds longer to load than one hosted on the continent, potentially losing customers who are fed up waiting. The lesson is clear: latency has tangible economic outcomes.
Innovation, the African way
African innovation has never been about having the best app or code. It’s been about solving complex problems with ingenuity – delivering access where infrastructure is weak, affordability where resources are limited, and resilience where systems are vulnerable. The truth is that the fastest apps in Africa aren’t built better; they’re hosted better. Consider YouTube’s early rollout of local caches in Kenya and Nigeria. It wasn’t a new feature or design change that made the difference, but the simple act of hosting content closer to users.
This is what innovation looks like in practice, and it means that African users and businesses don’t pay the price of distance.
The infrastructure race goes deeper than cables
The cable landings are only the start. What matters next is how those new routes connect to the continent’s data centres and exchange points. Without that interconnection layer, traffic continues to hairpin off-continent even if there’s unused capacity just a few kilometres away. The good news is that we’ve seen progress in this regard. Intra-Africa east-west terrestrial routes are boosting speeds between coasts and also providing resilience when multiple subsea cables fail.
Neutrality has also become a strategic advantage. Africa Data Centres’ carrier- and cloud-neutral colocation facilities in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi, and Lagos house more than 50 carriers and major IXPs on-premises, enabling them to choose connectivity that suits them, avoid single-exit chokepoints, and keep costs down.
These IXPs are another of Africa’s real success stories, keeping traffic local and nurturing home-grown ecosystems. But if they remain tied to a single location, they risk becoming tomorrow’s bottlenecks. This is why many of them are expanding across multiple facilities, ensuring that no single site dominates a country’s traffic.
From silent race to strategic choice
The next phase of Africa’s digital growth will be driven by AI-powered workloads that can’t tolerate delay. Running these workloads offshore is not only inefficient, but it also undermines sovereignty and trust. By bringing compute power closer to the edge, Africa can unlock new industries, protect sensitive data, and ensure resilience against external shocks. This makes Africa’s silent race about more than just speed. It’s also about control, independence, and competitiveness, which will require partnerships among governments, regulators, and the private sector. This means:
- Policy clarity on data residency to encourage local hosting.
- Incentives for public platforms to be served from within Africa.
- Support for community-led IXPs to spread resilience beyond capital cities.
- Commitment to open peering and route diversity to avoid monopolies.
The cables may dominate the headlines, but the future will be decided in the neutral data centres and exchanges where latency is either turned into a liability or Africa’s greatest hidden advantage. Finding this balance is the first step in winning the race for the continent’s digital future.
