24-06-2025
Lagos Data Hub Taps Angola Cables for Continental Leap
LAGOS — Rack Centre's Lagos campus has entered a strategic collocation deal with TelCables Nigeria, a subsidiary of Angola Cables, marking a significant enhancement of West Africa's digital infrastructure. The agreement brings high-capacity network infrastructure and four major subsea cable systems—SACS, MONET, SEBRAS and EllaLink—directly into Rack Centre's campus, securing faster, lower-latency routes to Europe, the Americas and Latin America.
Fernando Fernandes, chief executive of TelCables Nigeria and West Africa, highlighted the strategic value of the SACS route to Latin America: 'Businesses in latency‑sensitive sectors—financial services, content delivery and real‑time communications—will experience faster transactions, reduced lag and an enhanced user experience.' He also emphasised that hosting within Rack Centre enables localisation of the Clouds2Africa platform, pricing in naira and shielding customers from foreign currency exposure.
The infrastructure rollout includes lighting redundant dark‑fibre rings into Rack Centre's network, ensuring high availability and resilience. Local end‑points for IaaS, PaaS and CDN services enable customers to consume scalable cloud resources domestically, while direct entrances to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud support hybrid and multi‑cloud strategies alongside dedicated internet access, IP Transit and IX peering.
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Since its establishment in 2012, Rack Centre has grown to host over 70 carriers, ISPs and Tier 1 networks. Its new LGS2 facility offers 13.5 MW of IT load, 7,200 m² of white space, four meet‑me rooms and a design PUE of 1.35, powered in part by sustainable energy sources. The facility's N+2 cooling, AI‑ready high‑density racks and building management system underscore its focus on efficiency and innovation.
Lars Johannisson, chief executive of Rack Centre, described the alliance with Angola Cables as pivotal. 'We can now offer 99.95 % SLA routes to more destinations, enabling enterprises, governments and cloud providers to meet performance and data‑residency requirements while keeping traffic local,' he said.
Angola Cables operates a global backbone spanning 33,000 km of subsea cables—including WACS, SACS and MONET—and extends another 50,000 km through partner systems, linking Africa with the Americas, Europe and Asia. It maintains over 30 points of presence and connectivity to more than 66 data centres worldwide, with capacity in excess of 18,500 Tbps.
The inclusion of SACS into Rack Centre's ecosystem is particularly significant. As Africa's first direct low‑latency submarine cable linking Angola and Brazil, the 6,165‑km SACS system became operational in 2018 and is designed with 40 Tb/s capacity. It bypasses traditional Europe‑and‑US routing, reducing latency and costs by declining dependence on indirect paths.
The WACS cable system also plays a role, linking Nigeria and Angola to Europe with 14.5 Tbit/s design capacity and more than 500 Gbit/s active capacity to date. MONET, a 10,556‑km subsea link between Brazil and the US, offers 64 Tb/s and connects to Rack Centre via SACS integration. EllaLink extends connectivity between Europe and Latin America via Portugal to Brazil, further diversifying routing options.
Industry observers note that West Africa has faced connectivity challenges such as cable cuts and over‑reliance on single routes. Estimates suggest that up to 80 percent of subsea disruption incidents are attributed to accidental damage along the West African corridor. By integrating multiple, redundant systems—including the only direct Africa–Latin America route—the partnership reduces vulnerability.
In addition to resilience and performance gains, the initiative supports strategic trends in regional cloud adoption. Enterprises and hyperscalers in Lagos and across West Africa increasingly demand local cloud access, multi‑cloud flexibility and sovereign data environments—requirements that cannot be fully met through satellite or offshore data routing. The on‑campus Clouds2Africa presence eliminates cross‑border ingress/egress fees and foreign exchange volatility for customers paying in naira.
As global data flows and artificial intelligence workloads rise, latency optimisation and localised cloud access become vital. Rack Centre's LGS2 architecture aligns with this demand, having been certified as the first EDGE‑certified data centre in EMEA by the International Finance Corporation in 2022. With this enhanced infrastructure, Lagos solidifies its role as a key digital hub—offering enterprises, governments and cloud service providers a robust foundation for secure, resilient, sovereign operations.
