Africa has made rapid progress in expanding digital connectivity, but growth in local compute capacity continues to lag behind demand, widening a structural gap in the continent’s digital infrastructure.

According to Guy Zibi, Managing Partner at Xalam Analytics and keynote presenter at the annual Africa Digital Infrastructure Outlook session hosted by Africa Hyperscalers, Africa has added more than 50 new subsea cable landing points over the past five years, bringing over 200 terabits of international design capacity to its shores. Terrestrial fiber deployment has also accelerated, with an estimated 300,000 kilometres laid across the continent during the same period, strengthening network resilience and supporting the expansion of 4G and fiber-to-the-home services.

These investments have translated into a sharp rise in connectivity. According to analysis presented at the Africa Digital Infrastructure Outlook, the number of Africans with what analysts describe as “meaningful connectivity” has nearly tripled since 2020, and is expected to surpass 1 billion by 2030.

Yet this progress has not been matched by comparable growth in local data center and compute capacity. Africa accounts for roughly 17–18 per cent of the world’s population, but its share of global data centre capacity, public cloud consumption and AI compute remains in the low single digits.

“Connectivity is no longer the binding constraint in much of Africa,” said Guy Zibi, Managing Partner at Xalam Analytics. “The challenge now is that compute and interconnection are not scaling fast enough to support the demand that connectivity is unlocking.”

The imbalance risks reinforcing Africa’s dependence on offshore compute, limiting value capture from the continent’s growing digital economy.