Construction begins on huge data centre in Ethiopia

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Raxio Group (“Raxio”), a premier pan-African data centre developer and operator, held a ceremony to formally kick-off the construction of the country’s first private Tier III carrier neutral colocation data centre at the ICT Park in Addis Ababa.

The event was attended by members of the media, officials from the Industrial Parks Development Corporation, representatives from Raxio Group and Yema Architecture.

During the event, Raxio presented its site plans and vision to experts and invited guests, while highlighting the significance of the data centre to Ethiopia’s digital transformation.

In his opening remarks, Robert Mullins, President of Raxio Group, gave his vision of the facility as a cornerstone to Ethiopia’s digital economy by providing a critical and missing part of digital infrastructure in the country. “After extensive design development, we are excited to put a spade in the ground and begin construction of what we expect to be our first of several facilities in Ethiopia.

We have kept our customers, both inside and outside Ethiopia, at the heart of our design process and are building a facility to accommodate the expected demand surge over the coming years for truly world-class digital infrastructure in the country.

This also marks a big milestone for the industry: Raxio’s data centre will support the growth of the IT sector and will be a catalyst for highly skilled job creation in Ethiopia,” Mullins added.

To complement its internal team, Raxio has assembled experienced technical partners specialised in design, engineering, and construction. Future-tech (UK) has been appointed as the lead consultant, and Yema Architecture (ET) has been appointed as the local architect to manage design localisation, permitting, and construction supervision.

Development of the facility is underway and commissioning is targeted by the end of 2021. Raxio expects its team in Ethiopia to be fully staffed with local resources, who will be responsible for operating the facility to the highest international standards.

The data centre landscape in Ethiopia is largely nascent. With most enterprises opting to build self-managed in-house facilities that are sub optimal and financially overbearing, there is a need for a purpose built, professionally managed data centre that will cater to companies that are looking to leverage their IT infrastructure to grow their business.

Raxio will provide carrier and cloud neutral colocation services to its customers, creating a healthy environment for businesses to interconnect and create new opportunities.

Once commissioned, the data centre is expected to offer its customers an optimised environment for their IT equipment in a state of the art, modular facility, fully equipped with industry best in technology, security, AC/DC power compatibility and redundancy making Raxio Ethiopia an integral backbone to the country’s digital economy.

The data centre is designed to a truly “metro-edge” international standard, using the latest in technology and in keeping with Raxio’s core sustainability principles to minimize the environmental footprint.

With the liberalization of the broader telecommunications sector, and improved connectivity, the facility will meet the requirements of the most demanding customer segments allowing them to run their critical IT systems optimally, in a built-for-purpose environment.

Raxio Ethiopia is to deploy its metro-edge facility using a hybrid approach, using the best of traditional construction methods with pre-fabricated components to accommodate a final-day IT-capacity of up to 3.0MW (~700 racks).

This follows the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding between Raxio and the EIC in December 2019. The MOU formalised Raxio’s investment plans and the EIC’s commitment to supporting Raxio in operationalising its plans which led to securing land within the ICT park.

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