Ugandan banking firm Centenary Group plans to build a new data center in Masaka.

The group’s Cente Tech subsidiary plans to build a new Tier III facility on land to the west of capital city Kampala to serve the company and its customers. Facility specifications weren't shared.

“This morning, Centenary Group Head of IT & Ag. CEO Cente Tech Dr. Grace Ssekakubo and CTO, Peter Kahiigi, toured land in Masaka that has been earmarked as the site for the construction of a Tier III data center. The project will be funded by Centenary Group,” the company tweeted last week.

In further posts, the group said the facility will be the first Tier III data center outside of Kampala, and part of its goal to use financial services to eradicate poverty among the rural poor and improve living standards.

“The industry-grade data center will be a key asset to serve Centenary Group’s growth strategy; delivering secure, reliable, high-performance data center, cloud, and interconnection solutions to the Group’s growing subsidiaries & customer ecosystem across Uganda and the region,” the company said.

Centenary Group is a Ugandan banking group formed after a 2020 reorganization by its now-subsidiary Centenary Rural Development Bank. The company also formed a technology subsidiary known as Cente Tech and is moving into property development and management.

Ssekakubo added: "This will be a transformative milestone in the growth of our Group to further expand our infrastructure to aid the success of the Group’s subsidiaries and customers in the private sector."

Raxio opened the country’s first Uptime-certified Tier III data center in Kampala in May 2021.

The government of Uganda launched a data center in 2019 in Jinja it claims is Tier III, but isn't listed on Uptime's site.