At the start of each year, we share our outlook on what lies ahead for Africa’s digital infrastructure ecosystem. This forecast blends advocacy and evidence – what we believe must happen to unlock scale through collaboration, alongside insights drawn from capital flows, project pipelines, policy signals, and historical patterns across the continent.
We do not claim to predict the future with certainty. Our perspective is shaped by ongoing engagement with operators, investors, regulators, development finance institutions, and technology providers, combined with analysis of public commitments, announced investments, and observed market behavior. Together, these signals inform our view of what 2026 is likely to deliver, and where execution will matter most.
Overview
While the global economy is expected to expand cautiously, slowing from 2.9% in 2024 to around 2.6% in both 2025 and 2026 amid tighter financial conditions and geopolitical uncertainty, Africa’s growth outlook is expected to strengthen. Economic growth across the continent is projected to accelerate into the 3.8 – 4.3% range, supported by improving macroeconomic stability in several large economies, easing inflation, increased public and private investment, and a gradual recovery in consumption and trade.
This divergence highlights Africa’s relative growth momentum at a time when advanced and emerging markets face structural slowdowns. It also reinforces the importance of sustained investment in digital infrastructure, connectivity, and productivity-enhancing sectors to translate growth into durable, long-term economic gains.
Investment
Recent commitments signal growing confidence in Africa’s digital infrastructure, with at least $1.2 billion announced in 2025 across connectivity, backbone fiber, and public digital infrastructure – largely driven by development finance institutions (DFIs). This includes €450 million ($530 million) in IFC-backed financing to expand broadband and mobile connectivity through Orange Mali and Maroc Telecom across Mali and Chad; $500 million in World Bank financing for Nigeria’s Project BRIDGE; $120 million in World Bank grant funding to strengthen Zambia’s public digital infrastructure; $65 million raised by WIOCC to expand open-access backbone capacity across Africa, and the AfDB’s $0.4m for DIGIAPE)
The total investment is harder to define. While this reflects the availability of patient capital for foundational assets, it also highlights a sharp contrast with other regions. In Asia-Pacific, more than $15 billion had been raised for data centers alone by mid-2025 across 21 financing transactions, contributing to an estimated $800 billion colocation market. Despite similar population growth dynamics, Asia’s deeper capital markets, large enterprise base, strong cloud and AI demand, and clearer data sovereignty posture continue to attract significantly larger private capital flows.
At our Hyperscalers Convergence Africa session, financiers consistently highlighted bankability as the core constraint. Many projects fail long before reaching lenders because risks are poorly defined, revenue models are unclear, and early-stage preparation is weak. This is why DFIs are increasingly moving earlier into the project lifecycle – funding feasibility studies, land acquisition, and structuring – to ensure assets are financeable before syndication.
In West Africa in particular, digital infrastructure projects face a combination of structural challenges: local interest rates exceeding 30%, persistent perceptions of telecom operators as cash cows, fueling rent-seeking and vandalism, low levels of infrastructure sharing, and underutilization of existing assets. Meanwhile, although sovereign wealth and pension funds across Africa collectively manage nearly $1 trillion, less than 1% is allocated to infrastructure. At the same time, much domestic capital remains concentrated in real estate markets in cities like Lagos and Nairobi, rather than being deployed into productive digital assets.
While AI dominates narratives, bankable use cases that ensure predictable returns remain limited, making many investors cautious. This is where local capital has an important role to play, de-risking early stages, deepening markets, and preparing assets for larger pools of institutional funding. If local enterprises increasingly adopt local data centers and cloud platforms, demand for colocation capacity is expected to rise materially.
Unlike power projects, where long-term offtake agreements underpin cash flows, digital infrastructure faces a sharper revenue challenge. Data centers, fiber, and cloud platforms must demonstrate demand certainty, operational reliability, enforceable rules, and credible paths to return of capital to unlock patient investment.
Looking ahead to 2026, the outlook is cautiously constructive. We expect greater emphasis on project preparation facilities, more deliberate mobilization of pension and insurance capital, increased use of blended finance structures, and stronger policy coordination to narrow Africa’s risk premium. Demand for bandwidth and compute is rising rapidly, but capital will flow only to projects that move from ambition to bankable, repeatable models. While some operators will continue to pursue IPO narratives, without robust fundamentals and credible cash flows, market repricing will be unforgiving. What the ecosystem needs most are deeper, more liquid private markets to support long-term digital infrastructure growth.
Data Centers and AI
On the data center and cloud side, forecasts remain firmly upward. Multiple market trackers project Africa’s data center investment market to grow steadily through the decade. For example, Arizton estimates total investment will exceed $6.81 billion by 2030, driven by accelerating cloud adoption, expanding subsea capacity, and deeper inland fiber penetration. As enterprises, governments, and digital platforms generate more data locally, demand for resilient, in-country compute continues to rise.
North Africa is expected to lead near-term data center investment, supported by relatively stronger grid stability, improved access to competitively priced power, clearer cross-border regulatory frameworks, and policy environments increasingly open to international capital. Well-designed data sovereignty frameworks are reinforcing this momentum—providing clarity on data residency, security, and compliance while remaining interoperable with global cloud platforms. Where sovereignty is implemented in collaboration with hyperscalers, local operators, and funders, it strengthens the investment case by anchoring demand locally without fragmenting markets.
Southern Africa is likely to follow, anchored by South Africa’s mature enterprise base, established financial services sector, and proximity to hyperscale cloud ecosystems. Here, data sovereignty is increasingly shaping hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, driving demand for in-country capacity while preserving cross-border scale and resilience. West Africa continues to attract incremental investment, led by Nigeria, as connectivity improves and demand from enterprises, financial players, content platforms, and government digitization deepens. Clear, pragmatic sovereignty policies, aligned with cloud providers and development finance, can accelerate this trend by converting regulatory intent into bankable, long-term demand for local data centers.
Over time, this growth is expected to broaden eastward as power availability improves, policy clarity increases, and project structures become more bankable. Across regions, the lesson is consistent: data sovereignty works best as an investment enabler, not a restriction, when it is predictable, phased, and designed with industry participation, it can catalyze data center development, crowd in capital, and strengthen Africa’s position in the global digital economy.
AI will dominate industry conversations in 2026, though much of the activity will remain aspirational in the near term. Retrofitting existing data centers for AI workloads is complex, given long build timelines and the still-unproven economics of AI-specific facilities outside established global clusters. While global technology companies are expected to spend over $500 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, only a limited share is likely to flow into Africa initially.
Insights from our AI Infrastructure and Convergence Africa sessions underscored a consistent theme: Africa’s AI ambitions are constrained less by talent and more by infrastructure – specifically the availability of AI-ready data centers, reliable power, high-capacity fiber, and secure local cloud environments. As a result, data center investments are increasingly assessed not just for colocation demand, but for their ability to support compute-intensive, latency-sensitive, and sovereign workloads at scale.
Across all regions, power remains the defining constraint and differentiator. Power purchase agreements, captive generation, grid negotiations, and bankable energy contracting are now central to data center execution and investment decisions. We also expect greater decentralization of capacity, with smaller, modular facilities complementing large hubs to serve edge demand, latency-sensitive applications, and national data sovereignty requirements.
Taken together, these dynamics point to a continent-wide shift toward locally hosted, resilient digital infrastructure, where data centers are no longer viewed as standalone real estate assets, but as core components of Africa’s energy, connectivity, and digital economy strategy.
… and Connectivity
In connectivity, 2026 will be less about new subsea announcements and more about landing value inland, through backbone densification, metro fiber, cross-border corridors, and last-mile expansion. With subsea cables now landing in at least 35 African countries and markets like Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt hosting eight or more systems each, the constraint has shifted decisively to middle- and last-mile networks. Nigeria illustrates this gap clearly: while subsea capacity exceeds 360 TBPS, and internet penetration has crossed the 50% mark, fixed broadband remains below 6%, prompting the launch of the proposed $2 billion Project BRIDGE, expected to kick off in 2026. In the interim, operators and now governments are supplementing terrestrial builds with satellite solutions, including Starlink partnerships and support for satellite-based Direct-to-Device services.
Macroeconomic pressures continue to shape deployment choices. Although FX conditions are stabilizing and tariffs in some markets are becoming more cost-reflective, dollar-priced equipment has slowed smaller operators, accelerating a shift from aging wireless platforms toward fiber where economics allow. In 2026, we expect operators to respond more directly to P&L realities by moving away from fragmented builds toward coordinated middle-mile and metro integration, reducing duplication and freeing capital for underserved regions. Rising data usage and campaigns to improve Autonomous System Numbers and IPv6 proliferation will further strengthen the case for local hosting, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), and regional data centers, while satellite and hybrid models become strategic complements. The defining shift ahead is coordination – shared infrastructure, consortium builds, and policies that treat resilience and scale as economic imperatives, not technical preferences.
Policy
Policy momentum across Africa strengthened in 2025, marked by a shift from fragmented interventions toward coordination, execution, and infrastructure-first regulation. In Nigeria, a long-overdue tariff adjustment and the announcement of the metro backbone, Project BRIDGE, signaled a move away from piecemeal builds toward a structured, PPP-led national fiber backbone. Ghana advanced similar thinking through its dig-once policy, designed to reduce duplication, lower civil-works costs, and accelerate fiber deployment.
Across other markets, progress continued on data sovereignty frameworks, cloud and hosting guidelines, spectrum reform, and infrastructure-sharing mandates. Regulators demonstrated greater openness to industry consultation and phased implementation, moving closer to co-creation with operators, investors, and technology providers. In 2026, we expect increased support for IXPs, clearer rules for satellite and hybrid connectivity, and more consistent enforcement across markets.
While challenges remain, particularly around execution and subnational coordination, the direction of travel is positive. Clearer policy frameworks and regulator upskilling are helping to deepen the industry, narrow risk premiums, and create the predictability required for long-term digital infrastructure investment.
Insecurity
Insecurity remained a major non-sector constraint affecting digital infrastructure development across several African markets in 2025. Fiber cuts, tower vandalism, diesel theft, and deliberate sabotage increasingly reflected broader challenges of poverty, weak local enforcement, and insecurity rather than failures of industry planning or investment appetite. For operators and investors, these risks translated directly into higher operating costs, service disruptions, delayed rollouts, and elevated risk premiums, particularly in regions where infrastructure is viewed as an unprotected or extractive asset rather than shared national capital.
In Nigeria, the Christmas Day terrorist attack in Sokoto underscored the scale of the challenge, but it also marked a potential inflection point. The renewed security posture and coordinated actions by Nigerian authorities, with backing from international partners including the United States, signal a more serious recognition that insecurity is both a national and economic threat. If sustained in 2026, stronger security enforcement could materially improve the operating environment for digital infrastructure, reducing vandalism, protecting backbone assets, and restoring investor confidence in high-impact but underserved regions.
Looking ahead, the industry’s resilience will increasingly depend on how governments classify and protect digital infrastructure. Treating fiber networks, towers, data centers, and subsea landing points as critical national infrastructure, backed by enforcement and community engagement, will be essential. Without addressing insecurity at its root, progress in policy, funding, and technology risks being undermined on the ground. With it, however, Africa can unlock faster deployment, lower costs, and more inclusive digital access, especially in regions that need it most.
Closing
The signals from 2025 point to a digital infrastructure market that is maturing, but still uneven. Capital, demand, and policy intent are increasingly aligned, yet execution will determine outcomes. In 2026, progress will hinge less on announcements and more on delivery, turning policy into permits, capital into construction, and demand into predictable, bankable revenue. Africa’s digital future is both achievable and financeable. The task ahead is clear: to build it deliberately, collaboratively, and at scale.
