Pan-African data centre operator Raxio Group has passed $380 million in committed capital after existing shareholders Roha, a US-based infrastructure investor, and French infrastructure firm Meridiam increased their stakes, and the company reported that contracted power capacity grew sixfold in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year — a jump it attributed to rising demand from cloud and AI workloads.
The fresh equity, which lifts the company’s capital base from $350 million, follows a $100 million financing package secured from the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation last year, alongside debt funding from French development finance institution Proparco and the Emerging Africa & Asia Infrastructure Fund.
Raxio operates Tier III-certified, carrier-neutral data centres in Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Angola, with a planned expansion into Tanzania under development. The company has framed itself as the operator with the largest greenfield data-centre build-out on the continent, and said it is exploring renewable energy integration alongside grid supply as demand scales.
The sixfold jump in signed power contracts is the more telling data point. Raxio said it is seeing a growing pipeline of deployments requiring 10 megawatts of capacity and above — noticeably larger than past project sizes — and is increasing rack densities across its facilities to support higher-performance computing and AI workloads. That shift mirrors the global industry transition Turner & Townsend flagged in its most recent data centre construction cost index, from air-cooled cloud facilities toward higher-density, liquid-cooled architectures built for AI training and inference.
The market context is a scale-up whose eventual size is still being sized. McKinsey expects Africa’s installed data centre capacity to grow from about 0.4 gigawatts today to between 1.5 and 2.2 gigawatts by 2030, requiring an estimated $10 billion to $20 billion in new investment and unlocking a revenue pool the consultancy puts at $20 billion to $30 billion across the value chain. Raxio’s contract growth suggests some of that projected trajectory is arriving now.
But the picture is unlikely to be even. McKinsey has cautioned that Africa’s data-centre build-out will not follow the growth path of other regions, with demand developing unevenly across the continent and outcomes hinging on power reliability, regulatory conditions and infrastructure readiness in each market. Investors, operators and policymakers, the consultancy argues, need to assess each country separately rather than treating the continent as a single opportunity — a warning that lands sharply given that African data centre capacity remains concentrated in a handful of markets, with South Africa alone accounting for roughly 70% of the continent’s IT load.
For Raxio, which has built into second-tier markets rather than the concentrated South African cluster, the capital increase and demand jump land as a bet that the AI-driven build-out will spread outward from those anchor markets faster than the base rate suggests.
