Rack Centre is planning to build a 12MW data center in the Ikeja area of Lagos, Nigeria.

The company announced the planned construction at a recent media parley and data center tour of the current facility in Lagos.

The construction is a part of the company’s ambition to expand its data center capacity in West Africa ten-folds.

The company is set to hold a groundbreaking event on April 27.

The new facility will be known as the Rack Centre LGS 2 and will be situated on a 20,000 sqm (215,280 sq ft) greenfield site. The data center itself will offer 3,240 sqm (34,875 sq ft) of lettable space and have a net IT load of 13.5MW, including the LGS1 data center. This is a significant increase over the LGS1 which has an IT load of 1.5MW over 1,094 sqm after expansion in 2021.

Rack Centre’s COO, Ezekiel Egboye, said: “The Lagos Campus data center has grown to be the largest carrier and cloud-neutral digital infrastructure hub in West Africa, and with this expansion, we intend on further growing our thriving ecosystem,’’ adding that the company is delighted to be part of the continent's ongoing digital transformation.

The company is intending to host hyperscalers, content and cloud delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs) at the colocation facility.

Rack Center was founded in 2012 and acquired by Actis in 2020. It has an ecosystem including over 60 telecommunications carriers and ISPs, and has direct interconnections to the five undersea cables serving the South Atlantic Coast of Africa, including Equiano and 2Africa. The company also claims to have the first EDGE Green Certified data center in Africa.

Another data center provider, WIOCC, launched a data center in Lagos through its Open Access Data Centres platform in December 2022. The facility is planned to support up to 20MW of site load across more than 7,200 sqm (77,500 sq ft) of white space; enough for 3,200 racks, and can be scaled up to 40MW.