The Rise of the African Cloud - 2023: Public Clouds, Sovereign Clouds and the Commercial Case for Enabling Africa's Digital Transformation

African companies are answering the irresistible call of the cloud. From the ability to scale operations, boost innovation and bolster business continuity in the face of inadequate power infrastructure, migrating to the cloud has become a central component of Africa’s digital transformation. 

Examples abound. In 2022, financial services group Old Mutual shut down its physical data centres to move its workloads almost entirely to the cloud. Airline company Comair consolidated a footprint of 6 physical data centers into a single cloud deployment. Startups like Cellulant and Kobo 360 continue to lead public cloud adoption, pushing and testing the boundaries of databases and machine learning in the African context. One of the continent’s largest telcos, MTN has been testing the deployment of the core of its future 5G stand-alone network into the public cloud - a seminal development that would put in the cloud the brains for one of the most significant technology deployments of the next decade. 

At last, the African market has entered the age of the cloud, a period of prodigious growth in Internet usage and extensive digitization of Africa’s productive capacity. The African cloud is now a multi-billion-dollar commercial opportunity growing at 25%-30% a year. It is also a highly dynamic and complex marketplace, where hyperscalers compete and partner with a broad range of telcos, data center providers and cloud specialists.

Building on 12 months of research, dozens of customer and service provider discussions and underpinned by proprietary cloud adoption surveys, this report provides arguably the most in-depth view publicly available into the surging potential of African cloud markets. The analysis explores key demand considerations, supply factors including infrastructure, market structure and competitive context. It also provides a deep quantitative view of market size and projections, at regional and key country levels.