The African Development Bank will fund the building of a data center in Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo.
The project will be supported by €52.47 million ($57m) of funding from the African Development Bank and €14.5 million ($15.8m) from the government of the Republic of Congo.
The planned three-story data center in the capital city is said to include cooling facilities, office space, and is expected to be complete by the end of this year.
The operator of the data center is still unknown - with the bank saying it will be managed by a 'delegate' once the work is finished. Other specifications of the data center have also not been shared.
In addition to the data center build, 600km (372 miles) of fiber optic cable will be laid via the Congo River, with interconnecting routes to Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
Michel Ngakala, coordinator of the Central Africa Fibre-Optic Backbone project, said: “Congo will soon be the only country in Central Africa to have its own data center. Ultimately, the video conferences we run here will no longer go through a server in Europe, America, or elsewhere, before coming back to us. Everything will happen right here.”
“This project will cement the country’s digital sovereignty, because we cannot claim to be sovereign when our data, even the most sensitive data, is stored outside our territory, in foreign countries, with real risks of misuse, violation, or massive leaks,” he continued.
The new data center will allow all public data to be stored in Congo, as well as the data of banks, telecom operators, and private firms.
Samatar Omar Elmi, chief ICT specialist at the African Development Bank, said: “The availability of locally produced data will pave the way for a virtuous circle of local value creation that will benefit the entire digital ecosystem (public, private, etc.) in our countries. These are the initial stages of a digital circular economy that will contribute to the low-carbon development of our continent.”
The African Development Bank has also recently funded several road infrastructure projects in the Republic of Congo, such as the Ketta-Djoum Road on the Yaounde-Brazzaville corridor, and is financing the construction of a railroad bridge to link the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The bank said it has 11 projects in the Republic of Congo, totaling $411.62 million. Telecommunications projects account for 13.7 percent of the total investment. The bank also made significant investments in Liberia in March 2023 to upgrade payments infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the Republic of Congo government launched a data center in Pointe-Noire, built by the Postal and Electronic Communications regulatory. The data center took two years to build and holds capacity for 54 racks across 156 sqm (1,680 sq ft).
