Strive Masiyiwa, founder of Econet Global is re-entering Nigeria with the commencement of the construction of a $100 million Data centre facility, named the ADC Atlantic, in Lagos.
The Zimbabwe-born founder announced this in a Facebook post over the weekend. According to him, this “will be the largest facility outside South Africa.”
He also announced that he has secured the approval of a $300 million investment into the business by the United States government’s International Development Finance Corporation known as DFC. This investment will allow him expand the data centre facilities in South Africa and Kenya, as well as build new facilities in Egypt, Ghana, and Morocco.
The construction of the Data Centre will also pave the way for his innovative renewable energy solutions company, Distributed Power Africa (DPA) to enter into Nigeria as its services would be required to provide the power system for the facility using solar power and natural gas.
According to Mr Masiyiwa, ADC Atlantic started out as a single facility in Kenya, some years ago. “It was not a company, but as my team and I watched what was happening we realised it should become a separate company. We hired experts from around the world, and brought them together. We then began to expand the business by inviting investors,” he adds.
Mr Masiyiwa has been able to raise $500 million for the Data centre business to date.
This is not the first time the Econet founder is doing business in Nigeria. His mobile telecoms business was the first GSM operator to go live in Nigeria. However, he left Nigeria when shareholders in the Nigerian entity, Econet Wireless Nigeria were voted out of management and their management contract was cancelled.
Econet Global came later with the launch of a pay-tv business, called Kwese Tv but it shut down in 2019.
