Infrastructural Development at Rack Centre Excites FG

Emma Okonji

The federal government has expressed delight over what it described as massive infrastructural development at Rack Centre, a Tier 111 Co-location data centre operator.

The Director-General of the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Nigeria’s technology regulatory agency, Mr. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, who expressed government’s delight during his official visit to the data centre in Lagos recently, commended the massive infrastructural investment taking place at Rack Centre, West Africa’s carrier neutral data centre. He said the development aligns with the NITDA’s objective of increasing capacity and enabling local hosting in Nigeria-based data centre.

Abdullahi, who visited Rack Centre as part of his working visit to technology-based private and public establishments in Lagos, said the Agency’s desire was that both government agencies and the private sector host locally to reduce cost.

According to him, “We are stimulating digital demand within the public sector; our regulatory activities are to help open the ecosystem. We are constantly consulting with the stakeholders to build capacity and challenge locally based technology companies, including startups, to compete internationally. To this end, Rack Centre has made Nigeria proud with its massive data centre infrastructure, coupled with the range of high profile and prestigious global awards it has received since its inception, a demonstration of our world-class capability.”

Rack Centre recently announced an expansion program that will increase capacity by 13 MW of IT power, in addition to the current expansion to 1.5MW of IT power due to launch in June 2021. The company said the expansion program would bring unprecedented carrier neutral data centre capacity scale to West Africa, creating Nigeria as a hub for digital infrastructure and carrier neutral interconnect in the region. Every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa is directly connected to this Tier III certified data centre in Nigeria.

The Managing Director of Rack Centre, Dr. Ayotunde Coker, delighted at Abdullahi’s visit, said the investment outlay “is to build state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, the leader in West Africa capable of hosting both local and international players. We have achieved 100 per cent uptime and the most competitive levels of data centre efficiency in a challenging climatic environment.”

According to him, “With local infrastructure, NITDA can confidently encourage and enforce the sovereign data rules for hosting data locally and work with government stakeholders to create the policies that encourage competitive cost of capital and policies to drive the growth of digital infrastructure in the country, making Nigeria the delivery point of digital infrastructure in the emerging Africa free trade environment.”