WIOCC is moving quickly to convert fresh capital into physical infrastructure, accelerating its push beyond wholesale connectivity and deeper into owned digital assets. Days after announcing a $65 million sustainability-linked financing, the group confirmed plans to acquire seven data centers in South Africa from NTT’s local subsidiary, a transaction that would significantly expand WIOCC’s footprint in the continent’s most mature colocation market.
The proposed acquisition, expected to close following final regulatory processes, will be executed through WIOCC’s data center arm, Open Access Data Centres. The portfolio spans facilities in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban (Umhlanga), Gqeberha, East London, and Bloemfontein, giving OADC a national footprint that reaches beyond primary metros into secondary and edge locations. While the sites are smaller than South Africa’s newest hyperscale campuses, they are strategically positioned to serve enterprise workloads, regional redundancy requirements, and latency-sensitive applications.
The timing is not incidental. WIOCC’s newly secured $65 million facility – backed by development and institutional investors including the International Finance Corporation, Proparco, EAAIF, and Ninety One – was explicitly framed as growth capital to scale both network capacity and open-access data center infrastructure. The financing blends hard currency and rand-denominated tranches, a structure designed to reduce foreign exchange risk while supporting long-term infrastructure deployment in South Africa and other African markets.
Taken together, the capital raise and the NTT portfolio acquisition point to a deliberate strategic shift. WIOCC is positioning itself as an integrated digital infrastructure platform, combining long-haul and metro fiber, subsea capacity, and owned data center assets into a single, controllable stack. For hyperscalers, cloud platforms, content providers, and large enterprises, this convergence increasingly matters. Buyers are no longer optimizing only for raw bandwidth or rack space in isolation; they are seeking bundled solutions that reduce latency, improve resilience, and simplify procurement across borders and cities.
South Africa plays a pivotal role in that strategy. It remains Africa’s most established data center market, with the deepest enterprise demand, the most developed interconnection ecosystem, and the highest concentration of cloud on-ramps. For pan-African operators, it functions both as a revenue anchor and as a traffic gravity point for Southern Africa. Expanding there allows WIOCC to serve multinational customers locally while anchoring regional traffic flows that extend northward into its broader African network.
Regulators have approved the transaction subject to public-interest conditions, including commitments related to historically disadvantaged persons’ participation. Such conditions are now a standard feature of large infrastructure transactions in South Africa and will shape how WIOCC structures ownership and governance at the local level. Operationally, the bigger challenge will be integration: upgrading the acquired sites, aligning service standards, and weaving them tightly into WIOCC’s connectivity fabric so that the combined offering is differentiated rather than merely larger.
If executed effectively, the deal would mark more than an expansion in square meters and megawatts. It would underscore a broader trend in Africa’s digital infrastructure market, where connectivity operators are moving closer to compute, and data center operators are embedding themselves more deeply into networks. For WIOCC, the bet is that owning both sides of that equation will deliver stronger economics, stickier customers, and a more central role in how Africa’s digital traffic is generated, hosted, and exchanged.
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