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Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
by cliffordc 2y ago
Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
- danpalmer 2y agoI believe it's a combination of a lack of customers and lack of infrastructure. It's a big continent to cover with the necessary fibre capacity, and the market is much smaller for nearby services. Also what you don't see in things like this, or even a list of datacenter locations, is the relative sizes of the datacenters. After US east/west coasts and Europe, datacenter capacity rapidly tails off. Parts of Asia have plenty but not on the same scale I believe (although I don't know about the Chinese market). The difference in size can be quite a few orders of magnitude between different regions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- adamcharnock 2y agoThis isn’t just an issue for cloud providers. It’s also not easy to find collocation space either. My best guess is that it is a combination lower demand (vs rest of world), and infrastructure availability (connectivity + power). I can imagine a bunch of secondary factors too, but this to me sounds like the key broad reasons.
- prmoustache 2y agoSmaller market, less reliable power grids, more challenging heat management, less political stability in many african countries. Also, given their pricing, big cloud vendors AWS are a luxury many local businesses would probably not even consider.