Raxio Group, the pan-African colocation operator, is entering Tanzania and has lifted its funding pool to $380m. The money comes from its two main shareholders, the French infrastructure investor Meridiam and the US-based Roha Group, both of which have put fresh equity in before.
“Demand for high-quality data centre infrastructure continues to accelerate across Africa, driven by rapid digital adoption, cloud migration and the emergence of significant AI workloads,” said Robert Skjodt, Chief Executive Officer of Raxio Group.
“As we enter the next phase of growth, this additional capital strengthens our ability to capture these opportunities and continue delivering world-class, carrier-neutral infrastructure for our customers.”
The company already runs carrier-neutral facilities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Angola, Ethiopia, and Uganda, and has built its strategy around markets that hyperscalers have historically skipped.
Tanzania has been on that list for a while. Raxio announced a Dar es Salaam facility in March 2022, billed as the country’s first privately owned Tier III carrier-neutral data centre and originally due to be commissioned the following year.
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Skjødt, who took over as chief executive at the start of 2025, says the facilities are ready for what everyone is now building for. They have the power density, the cooling, and the connectivity that AI workloads demand, he said, and the customers are beginning to circle.
“We are beginning to see signs of international cloud providers making plans for Africa,” he said.
That is the whole bet, compressed into a sentence. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google have all been extending cloud services into the region, and a colocation operator with facilities already standing in six markets is positioned to be the landlord rather than the competitor.
The numbers behind the thesis are unusually stark. African data usage remains very low by global standards, but the continent has the youngest and fastest-growing population in the world, and demand for digital services has climbed with it.
McKinsey expects African data centre capacity demand to reach as much as 2.2 gigawatts by 2030, up from roughly 0.4 gigawatts today, in what it calls a phase of accelerated growth. Meeting that would take between $10bn and $20bn of investment over the next four years.
Set against that, $380m is a rounding error. It is also, in the context of African digital infrastructure, real money. Raxio has assembled its capital from the kind of investors that show up before commercial lenders do, including a $100m debt package from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation earlier this year, and a sustainability-linked facility of up to $170m from Proparco and the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund.
The contrast with Europe is worth holding onto. There, the binding constraint on data centre expansion is no longer capital but electricity: Denmark has paused new grid connections outright, and research suggests Europe’s sovereign AI ambitions may stall on grid readiness rather than funding. In much of Africa the constraint is more elemental. The capacity is not congested. It largely does not exist.
Which is why the operators moving now are the ones willing to build small and build early, in markets where a single Tier III facility changes the local calculus. Raxio’s facilities are metro-edge rather than hyperscale, and the company says it staffs each country with local teams rather than flying engineers in.
Skjødt did not disclose the size, cost, or opening date of the Tanzanian facility, nor how the $380m splits between the new equity and the debt Raxio has already raised. Dar es Salaam is the obvious site: it is Tanzania’s commercial capital, it is where the country’s subsea cables come ashore, and it is where the original 2022 plan pointed.
Whether the international cloud providers Skjødt says are “making plans” convert those plans into signed contracts is the question the $380m is riding on. The Dar es Salaam facility, four years after it was first announced, is where the answer starts.
