First Brick Holdings to invest $50 million in data centres by 2022

Internet users in East Africa that stood at 92 million in January 2018, are slated to cross the 100 million users mark by end of 2018 and keep growing at an average 20% annually over the next 5 years.

With more and more fibre connectivity, thus faster speeds and falling prices of internet (The National Information Technology Survey 2017/18 Report by Uganda’s National Information Technology Authority (NITA) indicates that the cost of internet has also reduced by 62.5% from $632 per 1Mpbs in 2011 to $237 in 2018) as well as more and more governments adopting e-governance, East Africa’s ICT market is looking upwards.

It is against this background that First Brick Holdings (FBH), a Roha Group company, has announced plans to build multiple data centers in the East and Southern Africa regions- a venture that will cost up to $50 million and see at least up to 5 data centres going live by 2022.

This announcement was made by Robert Mullins, FBH’s Executive Director at the just ended AfricaCom, the Largest African Telco, Media, and Technology Event, that took place in Cape Town from 13-15 November 2018.

First Brick is already in advanced plans to set up Raxio Data Centre at Namanve Industrial Business Park, a suburb of Kampala City- the first in a series of Data Centres across the region.

These data centres will open up new opportunities for financial services, governments and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) by addressing their mission critical needs for data storage, business continuity and disaster recovery and create a network of data centres able to accommodate international and regional customers in state-of-the-art facilities.

“Economic growth in East Africa is averaging between 5-10 percent across the region. When combined with parallel trends in digitalization and content consumption, we are seeing annual data usage and associated storage requirements increasing by 20-30 percent,” commented Robert Mullins, Executive Director at First Brick Holdings.

“From mission-critical enterprise services to e-government initiatives, the digital transformation of East Africa is being held back by the lack of secure, scalable, reliable, low latency data storage solutions. By leading investment in, and development of, data centres in the region, we are unlocking this latent demand in the market and removing a significant barrier to the continued digital transformation of this exciting and vibrant market.”