Airtel Africa launch Nxtra to accelerate digital growth
Airtel Africa has launched Nxtra by Airtel in Africa with the goal of accelerating the digital transition across the continent.
Nxtra is a new data centre business that has been founded based on a commitment to meet Africa’s growing need for trustworthy and sustainable data centre capacity, in addition to serving the fast-growing African digital economy.
The business is aiming to build one of the largest networks of data centres in Africa, with high-capacity data centres in major cities located across Airtel Africa’s footprint to complement its existing edge sites. The news also comes one year after the company opened a data centre in Lagos.
Digitally supporting African enterprises
An increasing number of companies are continuing to invest in data centres across Africa, in order to cater to rising demand in an era of mass digital transformation. The aim of Nxtra is to serve the growing need of African enterprises, with its data centre infrastructure designed to host the next generation of computing, while providing multi-MW capacity in a phased manner.
Nxtra by Airtel already designs, builds and operates one of the largest networks of hyperscale, core and edge data centres across India to deliver reliability, reach and flexible power configurations for a superior customer experience. Its facilities are equipped to provide scalable, digitised and borderless IT infrastructure to meet the needs of the most transformational companies across verticals.
Airtel Africa has stated that the Nxtra facilities will meet global security requirements. In addition to Airtel Africa’s fibre footprint, Nxtra is also aiming to offer secure and scalable integrated solutions to global hyper-scalers, large African enterprises, startups, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and governments.
Through locally available data centre capacity, speed to access digital services will improve and the cost of managing data will be reduced. It is the hope that helping power will increase innovation and also support a new generation of African tech talent. Nxtra is also helping customers to meet data sovereignty requirements while enabling more local cloud services to be offered in the countries where Airtel Africa operates.
Driving the future of Africa’s digital infrastructure
The first major Nxtra facility in Lagos, Nigeria, is expected to deliver 34MW of total power. It is designed to host high density racks and integrate the latest best practice construction to achieve 1.3 power usage effectiveness (PUE). It is expected that the facility will go live in mid-2025.
To further deliver on Nxtra’s vision, Airtel Africa has appointed Yashnath Issur as CEO of Nxtra by Airtel. Issur formerly served as Head of Global Data Centre Portfolio Management at Amazon Web Services and holds 16 years of experience in the industry. Over the past year, he has built a team of experts to execute on the strategy at Nxtra.
Airtel Africa’s Group CEO, Segun Ogunsanya, says: “A rapid increase in data centre capacity is needed to support the growth potential of Africa’s digital economy. We’re proud to drive the future of Africa’s digital infrastructure, unlocking opportunities for businesses to grow and fuelling economic prosperity.
“Airtel Africa’s team has consistently shown our ability to deliver on infrastructure projects across Africa, and we are confident that our next generation data centres will support our ambition to become the partner of choice for global customers and Africa’s newest tech unicorns alike.”
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