Africa’s digital transformation is no longer a distant promise – it is here, uneven but accelerating. Into this landscape, Digital Realty has placed a bold wager. The global colocation giant has appointed Marcel Louw as its new Managing Director for Africa, a move that signals not only a change in leadership but a deeper commitment to build the infrastructure that could determine the continent’s digital trajectory for decades.
Louw’s résumé indicates his employer’s readiness for the continent. A veteran of fund management and infrastructure investment, he helped launch vehicles at Pembani Remgro that backed some of the continent’s largest projects, including data centers in a joint venture with Digital Realty itself. He has also served at The Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Louw’s résumé casts him as an infrastructure financier turned operator, bridging global capital and African realities – the kind of leader Digital Realty needs to turn billions into sovereign platforms. Yet a finance pedigree does not equal operational grit. Running data centers means guaranteeing uptime, hardening fragile grids, and earning the trust of enterprises that measure reliability in milliseconds.
“Marcel’s extensive experience in infrastructure investment and fund management across Africa, the UK, and Europe will be instrumental in driving our next phase of growth on the continent,” said Paula Cogan, Managing Director for EMEA.
Louw himself seems ready:
“Africa is one of the world’s most dynamic digital frontiers, and its influence on the global digital economy continues to grow. As the continent’s leading data center provider, Digital Realty is uniquely positioned to deliver the critical infrastructure that connects Africa to the world.”
Deepening the Footprint
Digital Realty already operates facilities in Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, with investments topping $2 billion, most visibly through its majority stake in Teraco Data Environments, home to Africa’s largest internet exchange, NAPAfrica. In Nigeria, it has launched the 2MW LKK2 facility in Lagos. In Ghana, the 1.7MW ACR2 site in Accra is nearing completion. Teraco’s sprawling campuses in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town anchor the Southern African market.
Through PlatformDIGITAL®, its global interconnection architecture, Digital Realty is extending the same seamless fabric that links enterprises in Frankfurt or Singapore to governments and startups in Lagos and Nairobi. The ambition is clear: African businesses should connect to the global economy with the same speed, reliability, and sovereignty as their peers anywhere else.
Africa’s digital hand
For more than a decade, Africa’s internet has depended on fragile infrastructure: traffic that detours through Europe, hosting bottlenecks, and prohibitive costs that slow fintech, e-government, and AI adoption. Every new megawatt of compute capacity is not just power – it is sovereignty. Every neutral data center is not just real estate – it is also economic infrastructure. To grasp the scale, consider this: Virginia, USA, alone hosts more than 300 data centers. Across all of Africa, there are barely 120. The gap is huge. But so is the opportunity. In a world defined by compliance, latency, and trust, Africa’s growth will hinge on whether its data can stay, scale, and thrive on African soil.
The Competitive Arena
Digital Realty is not alone. Open Access Data Centres (OADC), part of the WIOCC Group, is rolling out edge and core facilities across multiple regions. Africa Data Centres (ADC), tied to Liquid Intelligent Technologies, operates in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Togo. Raxio Group is planting carrier-neutral sites from Côte d’Ivoire to Ethiopia. Rack Centre remains a flagship neutral hub in Nigeria. And most recently, MTN Nigeria entered the race with a 4.5 MW Tier III-certified data center in Lagos.
The Leadership Test
Against this backdrop, Louw inherits a portfolio with both promise and pressure. He must consolidate the successes of Teraco in Southern Africa while ensuring the new investments in Nigeria and Ghana deliver at scale. His challenge is to prove that Digital Realty is not just a foreign landlord, but an indispensable partner for African enterprises, governments, and global clouds.
Louw will find the managing part familiar – he knows how to engage boards, establish guidelines, and build processes. The harder part is directing: setting strategy amid currency volatility, rising competition, power instability, and regulatory complexity. His test is not simply keeping the lights on, but charting a course in markets where the risks are structural and the rewards transformative.
If he succeeds, Digital Realty’s billions will translate into more than ribbon cuttings. They will decide whether an African fintech can serve its customers without routing through Europe, or whether a government can run secure digital services on its own soil.
For Louw, the assignment is daunting. For Africa, the implications are transformational.
Digital Realty has placed its bet. The next move belongs to Africa.
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