As the digital transformation of sub-Saharan Africa accelerates, West Africa has emerged as a high-stakes battleground for digital infrastructure dominance. While Nigeria has traditionally commanded the lion’s share of international venture capital due to its market size, Ghana is positioning itself as a highly stable, resilient, and strategic gateway for global hyperscalers. At the core of this transition is Digital Realty Ghana, operating the premier, carrier-neutral ACR 1 and ACR 2 facilities in Accra.
In this exclusive dialogue with Joseph Koranteng, Managing Director, Digital Realty Ghana, we deconstruct the operational realities and friction points of building world-class infrastructure within the region. From navigating a “neck-and-neck” national power grid where industrial tariffs run at 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, to the execution of pioneering municipal “Dig Once” fiber policies, this conversation provides a rigorous, high-end assessment of the sub-Saharan digital landscape.
Temitope: If you look across the horizon at the next decade, what is the single most pressing technological challenge that Africa must resolve to unlock its digital economy, and what strategic intervention can address it?
Joseph Koranteng: From where we sit, the challenge cannot be limited to a single friction point. We are dealing with two deeply interconnected operational bottlenecks: connectivity and power.
Let’s dissect connectivity first. On a macro level, magnificent progress has been made on the subsea shores, but the domestic landscape remains fractured. We are witnessing an enterprise ecosystem that understands physical fiber and firewall architecture, yet the consumer space remains overwhelmingly wireless, leaving the last mile severely underserved. In fact, our latest data indicates that domestic home broadband penetration is hovering somewhere around a mere 10%. This is highly restrictive. For the digital era we are entering, the ecosystem demands deterministic, fast, low-latency throughput that wireless networks simply cannot sustain at scale.
Even the infrastructure we do have suffers from severe stability issues. Terrestrial fiber paths are routinely tampered with or severed due to ongoing civil construction, road expansions, and uncoordinated real estate developments. If the physical layer is constantly disrupted, systemic reliability is impossible.
Once we establish stable connectivity, the immediate adjacent challenge is power. While baseline generation capacity has improved across West Africa, grid stability remains a critical concern. Today, national energy demand runs completely neck-and-neck with supply and availability. Whenever there is even a minor hitch or upstream disturbance on the supply front, the lack of a buffer pushes the entire system into immediate operational difficulty. Once we can systematically fix connectivity and power, the rest of the technology ecosystem will naturally follow.
Temitope: To expand on that connectivity bottleneck, subsea capacity is booming with deployments like 2Africa and Equiano hitting the coast. Yet, the middle and last mile are challenged. How do we bridge this deficit and scale home connectivity from 10% to 50%?
Koranteng: It requires a structural shift from private investments to state-backed regulatory frameworks. Recently, the Ghanaian government, championed aggressively by the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, introduced a policy framework built around “Dig Once” municipal planning mandates. Historically, every telecommunications operator dug up roads to lay independent, redundant proprietary conduits, which is commercially inefficient and chaotic. The new policy shifts the paradigm: it mandates that major civil engineering and highway projects, such as the vital economic artery linking Accra and Kumasi (the two largest cities in Ghana), must natively integrate open-access fiber ducts directly into the road construction design.
This automatically drives down the capital expenditure of building infrastructure. Because road construction inherently involves digging, embedding the fiber connectivity at that exact phase allows us to extend backbone infrastructure deep into the inland regions. Within three to five years, as these major highway networks are completed, entire interior towns are natively color-coded for backhaul availability. From there, if an operator wants to extend to a local home, the deployment becomes virtually costless because the heavy-lifting mid-mile infrastructure is already active.
Temitope: Even with optimized construction, the economic realities of African consumer markets present a major barrier. How do operators reconcile high capital deployments with limited consumer purchasing power?
Koranteng: This is the core structural friction. If you look at the purchasing power of the average Ghanaian consumer and ask how many homes can actually afford to pay $30 or $50 a month for internet or bundled digital services, you quickly realize it is a massive commercial hurdle. If consumers cannot hit that price point, the private corporate business case for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) rollouts collapses entirely.
This is the classic, proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma. Private operators will not expand into remote or underserved regions because there is no immediate, profitable demand to justify the initial capex. Therefore, state fiscal policy must step in to incentivize the market.
Governments must aggressively remove artificial design costs. Can the state waive prohibitive right-of-way fees? Can it eliminate import taxes and customs duties on primary telecommunications equipment coming into the country? Our policy position is simple: governments must stop taxing the foundational infrastructure that drives economic growth, and instead tax the economic outcomes enabled by that infrastructure. By making it cheaper to build, everyone gets hooked onto the network, driving systemic growth that the state can comfortably monetize down the line. We are excellent at passing these progressive policies on paper, but the real test over the next few years lies entirely in strict, uncompromised execution.
Temitope: Turning to your second pillar, power; operating data centers requires continuous, uncompromised energy. What is the current operational power reality in Ghana, particularly regarding your energy mix and grid tariff structures?
Koranteng: Operationally, we ingest power directly from the national transmission grid at exceptionally high voltages, which insulates our facilities from standard distribution-level faults and keeps our environment relatively stable. Ghana’s primary energy matrix is quite progressive: approximately 25% to 30% is derived from clean hydro resources, 65% from thermal generation, and a minor 5% from emerging solar arrays.
While this provides a clean baseline, the structural risk is that national demand and supply run tightly neck-and-neck. We saw the stark reality of this recently when a major national disturbance hit the grid. Because there is negligible spinning reserve or structural buffer on the national grid, any upstream disturbance can destabilize the country’s grid ecosystem. While we deploy heavy industrial diesel backup generation systems, they are costly to run and act strictly as an emergency safeguard rather than a primary operational model.
The main issue is the cost. At nearly 20 cents per kilowatt-hour ($0.20/kWh), industrial power pricing in Ghana and across comparable East African hubs like Kenya is remarkably steep compared to global benchmarks. Because power is a direct, linear pass-through cost in data center colocation, high utility tariffs act as an immediate tax on our clients’ operational expenditure. This increases the total cost of production for fintechs, local enterprises, and cloud providers, slowing down the overall pace of technology adoption across the region.
Temitope: In markets like Nigeria, Independent Power Producers (IPPs) are generating substantial returns by bypassing the grid to deliver localized hybrid generation models directly to data centers. Why has that model not been widely adopted in Ghana?
Koranteng: We are actively exploring hybrid private generation models, but we face a regulatory hurdle rather than an infrastructure or investment deficit. In Ghana, the majority of heavy industrial IPPs operate within the specialized thermal enclave in Tema, located roughly 40 kilometers from our primary data centers. The challenge is the lack of an established regulatory framework for “power wheeling” – the ability for a private producer to inject power into the national grid at point A and synthetically deliver it to a private off-taker at point B using public transmission lines.
Without clear wheeling frameworks or open-access regulations, we cannot easily leverage remote IPP capacity. However, as the digital infrastructure lobby intensifies, establishing these power-wheeling policies will be critical to unlocking affordable, multi-megawatt hybrid energy portfolios for hyperscale facilities.
Temitope: Let’s focus on Digital Realty’s operational footprint in Ghana: the ACR 1 and ACR 2 facilities. What strategic role do these assets play in your broader West African roadmap, and what specific engineering thresholds define them?
Koranteng: Our deployment strategy is guided by a core rule: build institutional capacity as close to the localized epicenter of demand as possible. In West Africa, Ghana sits alongside Nigeria as the undisputed anchor for digital services, well ahead of surrounding Francophone markets. Beyond domestic demand, our commitment was catalyzed by securing the operational rights to host the historic Meta-led 2Africa subsea cable across seven strategic regional landing locations within our broader continental network.
In terms of technical architecture, the facility operates with a highly efficient 1.7-megawatt IT load capacity, precisely balanced at 500 kilowatts per data hall across two independent, structurally isolated halls. Redundancy is built into every layer: we ingest grid power from two entirely distinct geographical substations. This is backed up by three heavy industrial generators, rated at 2 MVA each, operating on an N+1 topology where even at 90% load, the system maintains a complete safety cushion. For thermal management, we utilize precision computer room air conditioner (CRAC) units configured to an N+2 architecture, exceeding standard Tier III criteria to provide institutional-grade uptime for global hyperscalers.
Temitope: Given Ghana’s compact geography and population size relative to Nigeria, how does that alter the market dynamics for advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and localized large language models?
Koranteng: Ghana’s compact geographical footprint and smaller population are distinct strategic advantages. It requires significantly less capital expenditure to deploy ubiquitous middle and last-mile connectivity across the entire country compared to a massive territorial expanse like Nigeria. This makes Ghana an ideal, agile testbed for dense technological ecosystems, including localized Artificial Intelligence deployments.
However, the AI opportunity requires domestic data residency. Despite our smaller size, Ghana possesses immense linguistic and cultural diversity. To build meaningful, localized AI use cases, we must train algorithms on sovereign, localized datasets that accurately reflect our unique environments. This underlines the vital importance of carrier-neutral data centers like ACR 1 and ACR 2. We don’t just provide space and power; we provide the physical sanctuary for the data sovereignty that will fuel West Africa’s autonomous technological future.
Editor’s notes
The insights from Digital Realty, Ghana highlight a critical reality for institutional infrastructure investors and policymakers: Africa’s digital transformation has moved past the speculative phase of subsea capacity accumulation and entered a complex period of terrestrial execution. The success of the next wave of growth will not be determined by landing more subsea cables, but by the regulatory and civil engineering frameworks that govern middle-mile fiber deployment, capital allocation and industrial energy availability.
