Airtel Africa has officially introduced Nxtra by Airtel (“Nxtra”), a novel data center enterprise committed to addressing the burgeoning demand for reliable and sustainable data center capacity in Africa. Nxtra’s primary goal is to contribute to the rapid development of Africa’s digital economy.
Nxtra envisions creating one of the largest networks of data centers across major cities strategically situated within Airtel Africa’s footprint, complementing its existing edge sites. The objective is to cater to the expanding requirements of African enterprises, with the data center infrastructure designed to accommodate the next generation of computing, offering multi-megawatt capacity in a phased manner.
These facilities will adhere to stringent global security standards and strive to achieve ‘five nines’ availability. Leveraging Airtel Africa’s extensive fiber network, Nxtra is poised to provide secure and scalable integrated solutions to global hyper-scalers, large African enterprises, startups, SMEs, and governments.
By providing locally available data center capacity, Nxtra aims to enhance the speed of accessing digital services and reduce the cost of managing data. This initiative is anticipated to foster increased innovation and support the development of a new generation of African tech talent. Moreover, Nxtra will facilitate customers in meeting data sovereignty requirements while simultaneously enabling the provision of more local cloud services in the countries where Airtel Africa operates.
The inaugural major Nxtra facility, set to be live in mid-2025 in Lagos, Nigeria, will deliver 34 MW of total power. Designed to host high-density racks, the facility integrates the latest best practices in construction to achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3.
To realize the vision of Nxtra, Airtel Africa has appointed Yashnath Issur, former Head of Global Data Centre Portfolio Management at Amazon Web Services, as the CEO of Nxtra by Airtel. With 16 years of experience in the industry, Yashnath has assembled a team of experts to execute on Nxtra’s strategy.
Segun Ogunsanya, Airtel Africa’s Group CEO, expressed confidence in Nxtra’s ability to support Africa’s digital infrastructure growth. He stated, “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.”
