New Africa Data Centres deal expands cloud services for South African businesses

Africa Data Centres, a subsidiary of the tech and telecom infrastructure company Cassava Technologies, has signed a strategic partnership with CSSi South Africa, a cloud provider and distributor of off-the-grid data centre equipment in Africa, to provide better data storage capabilities for local enterprises.

Think of Africa Data Centres as a landlord that owns secure buildings and power infrastructure. This partnership will now allow CSSi SA to install their high-performance racks and servers directly inside Africa Data Centres’ facilities, like a tenant. 

CSSi SA will deploy its infrastructure across Africa Data Centres’ facilities in Cape Town and Johannesburg, connecting them with 100GB links back to its own CipherVault data centre in Midrand. This setup is designed to provide up to three tiers of redundancy, meaning that the network is structured so that if one facility runs into a fault, others immediately take over to ensure zero downtime for clients.

“CSSi SA’s expansion into our South African facilities underscores the critical need for secure, high-performance data storage solutions in an era of rapid digital transformation,” said Adil El Youssefi, Chief Executive Officer of Africa Data Centres. “As businesses across South Africa and the broader African market accelerate their digital strategies, the demand for scalable, compliant, and resilient infrastructure has never been higher.” 

This partnership comes after Africa Data Centres’ parent company, Cassava Technologies, secured an undisclosed investment from U.S. chipmaker NVIDIA in October to accelerate the expansion of its data centres and cloud platforms and strengthen its operations across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. It also launched what it described as Africa’s first artificial intelligence multi-model exchange a month later. 

For the average business owner in South Africa, this alliance guarantees that any data stored on the cloud will remain within the country’s borders, ensuring they have sovereignty over it. It also ensures access to Tier 1 infrastructure for small and medium businesses within the country, as usually only massive corporations can afford to host their data in such high-calibre facilities. CSSi claims it can lower the barrier to entry by offering these world-class services to businesses and resellers at costs 65%–70% lower than previous market rates.

“The ability to leverage scalability, partner with the best Data Centre provider today in South Africa, and using economies of scale, which allow us to reduce the cost of data centre operations for our customers, was always the key reason for this partnership,” said James Grcic, CEO of CSSi SA.

This partnership strengthens the competitive capacity of Africa Data Centres and CSSi SA against market leaders like Teraco, currently South Africa’s largest data centre operator, and positions them at an advantageous position against other international players entering the market, like Equinix. 

“We see this partnership as unique, due to the growing demand for new hardware technology, with an insatiable demand for Data Sovereignty, uptime guarantees, and being able to offer world-class data centre facilities with the lowest latency, nationwide network and providing it right here in SA for South Africa,” Adil added.