Africa’s digital infrastructure debate is entering a new phase. After a decade defined largely by connectivity expansion, attention is shifting toward compute capacity, policy alignment, institutional readiness, and the structural decisions that will determine whether the continent captures value from its digital economy.
Those questions will be the focus of two upcoming editions of Africa Hyperscalers Conversations – A Global View, featuring Guy Zibi, Managing Partner at Xalam Analytics, and Bright Simons, President of mPedigree and Vice-President of Research at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, in separate sessions examining Africa’s infrastructure trajectory from market and governance perspectives.
The conversations come at a moment when global investment in digital infrastructure is accelerating rapidly. Hyperscalers are deploying tens of billions of dollars into cloud regions, AI-ready data centers, and interconnection platforms, while governments across multiple regions are repositioning digital infrastructure as strategic national assets.
Across Africa, connectivity has improved significantly over the past decade through new subsea systems, expanding terrestrial fiber backbones, and rising mobile broadband adoption. Yet the infrastructure required to process, host, and retain digital activity locally still lags demand.
Operational data center capacity across the continent remains concentrated in a handful of markets, including South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Morocco/Egypt. As a result, African economies are increasingly connected to the global internet but remain structurally dependent on external compute infrastructure.
For policymakers, investors, and operators, the central question is no longer whether digital demand will grow. It is whether Africa can build the institutional, regulatory, and infrastructure foundations required to support that growth locally.
Guy Zibi brings one of the continent’s most respected analytical perspectives on telecom markets, infrastructure investment cycles, and enterprise digitization.
As Managing Partner at Xalam Analytics, he leads frontier-market research covering connectivity, cloud economics, fiber strategy, and hyperscale infrastructure deployment across Africa and the Middle East. The firm’s investment-grade analysis has helped shape investor understanding of emerging digital infrastructure opportunities across frontier markets.
Before founding Xalam, Zibi co-founded AfricaNext Investment Research, where he led financial analysis on African telecom assets and wholesale capacity markets, and previously held senior analytical and consulting roles at Pyramid Research and The Economist Intelligence Unit.
Bright Simons brings a complementary perspective grounded in technology governance, supply-chain intelligence systems, and digital sovereignty debates.
He is the Founder and President of mPedigree, a globally recognized technology platform combating counterfeit medicines through verification and authentication systems deployed across multiple emerging markets, and serves as Vice-President in charge of Research at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, one of Africa’s leading public policy think tanks.
He has also served in advisory and governance roles across several global policy platforms, including the World Economic Forum’s Africa Strategy Group, the inaugural Microsoft Africa Advisory Council, the Lancet Commission on the Future of Health in Africa, and ODI Global.
Across these platforms, his work has examined how institutional design, regulatory coordination, and standards-setting influence Africa’s ability to build resilient digital systems rather than deepen dependence on external platforms.
Together, the conversations will address some of the most consequential questions facing Africa’s digital future: how infrastructure markets are evolving globally, what signals investors look for when evaluating African opportunities, how governments can strengthen execution capacity, and what it will take for the continent to move up the stack in an increasingly compute-driven digital economy.
As artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and platform-scale infrastructure reshape global competitiveness, Africa’s ability to align policy, capital, and infrastructure development will increasingly determine whether the continent participates as a builder of digital systems or primarily as a consumer of them.
For decision-makers across government, industry, and investment institutions, that transition is quickly becoming one of the defining strategic questions of the decade.
