Data Centres & Networks

Orange announced on Tuesday it is expanding its collaboration with OpenAI to deploy two new advanced open-weight reasoning models in its data centre infrastructure to boost support for AI solutions development across its footprint, particularly in Africa.

Czech telecoms firm České Radiokomunikace (CRA) says that it has obtained a building permit to construct a data centre on the outskirts of Prague, in the Zbraslav – Jíloviště area.

Google is reportedly planning to invest US$6 billion to establish its first data centre in India, with a planned IT load capacity of 1GW that would make it one of the largest such facilities in Asia-Pacific.

China is reportedly planning to build a network to connect thousands of new data centres in the country with the aim of selling the excess compute power and alleviating a capacity glut.

Scala Data Centres, which describes itself as Latin America’s leading platform for sustainable digital infrastructure serving the hyperscale market, says it has secured its first international project finance transaction: US$254 million in long-term funding to support the construction of three hyperscale data centres and a major power substation in Chile.

India-headquartered global communications technology player Tata Communications and cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) are collaborating to enable an advanced AI-ready network in India. The collaboration is said to mark one of India’s largest-ever network deployments by Tata Communications in terms of size, scale and bandwidth.

Philippine broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions said on Monday that its upcoming Caloocan data centre has secured full certification from the Uptime Institute as a Tier III facility.

TECO Electric & Machinery, a Taiwan-headquartered business group, has announced that it has secured some significant data centre projects in Malaysia, marking its entry into the hyperscale data centre sector.

Asia Pacific data centre operator Princeton Digital Group (PDG) has secured a US$1.2 billion investment from private equity firm Stonepeak to accelerate its regional expansion.

China Telecom has announced the industry's first pilot commercial deployment of distributed training for a large language model (LLM) with 177 billion (177B) parameters, using 1024 GPUs over a 500 km field-deployed fiber link.

Data centre company XDS Datacentres, which describes itself as a pioneer of liquid immersion digital infrastructure, has signed a major agreement with engineering and technology company ICS Arabia to deliver initial 10-megawatt immersion-cooled data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah.

Ooredoo is launching advanced sovereign AI cloud services in Qatar with support from digital infrastructure provider Syntys.

MTN Nigeria officially launched the first phase of its US$235 million data centre in Lagos on Tuesday, along with a cloud service to compete against the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.

Africa-headquartered technology company Cassava Technologies has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the South African AI Association (SAAIA), an industry body focused on growing responsible AI adoption, to deliver artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaas) across the African continent.

iXAfrica Data Centres, which owns and operates East Africa’s first hyperscale, AI-ready data centre, in Kenya, and EdgeNext, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and edge computing services, say they have partnered to drive the next wave of digital infrastructure growth across the region.

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) announced on Wednesday it is expanding its partnership with Digital Realty into west Africa via a deal to establish its planned internet exchange point (IXP) for Ghana in Digital Realty’s upcoming data centre in Accra.

Nokia announced on Thursday that it has signed a deal with Philippine fibre broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions to deploy its data center fabric solution to future-proof Converge’s new data centres with AI and automation technology.

West African Tier III carrier and cloud-neutral data centre Rack Centre says it has signed a strategic collocation agreement with network operator TelCables Nigeria, a subsidiary of Angola Cables.

MEO Wholesale Solutions has signed an agreement with Angola Cables, allowing it to expand its telecommunications services globally through the cable provider’s international subsea cable and data centre network.

BDx Data Centers’ Indonesian subsidiary said on Thursday it has signed an agreement to purchase 30 MVA of electricity from Indonesia’s national electric power distributor PLN for two of its data centres.

Africa Data Centres, part of pan-African technology group Cassava Technologies, has formed a commercial partnership with Blue Turtle, a South African enterprise IT solutions provider, to deploy colocation services in its Cape Town and Midrand data centres.

UAE-based Edgnex Data Centres by DAMAC announced on Tuesday it has started construction an AI data centre in Indonesia with a designed IT load capacity of 144MW and a price tag of US$2.3 billion.

Raxio Data Centres announced on Monday it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Digital Transition to form a strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation of public services and strengthen the country’s data sovereignty plan.

Naver, a Korean technology company whose interests include internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, has announced that it will build a next-generation AI data centre in Morocco as part of a consortium with AI tech giant Nvidia, AI infrastructure specialist Nexus Core Systems, and global investment firm Lloyd Capital.

Firebird, an AI cloud company, has announced a strategic collaboration with the government of Armenia and tech giant Nvidia for building advanced AI infrastructure in the country.

UAE-headquartered digital infrastructure company Khazna Data Centres has announced plans to collaborate with multinational corporation and technology company Nvidia to build artificial intelligence (AI) factories in the Middle East Africa (MEA) region.

Pan-Asian data centre operator Digital Edge announced on Monday it has formed a joint venture with Thai energy company B.Grimm Power to develop hyperscale, AI-ready data centre campuses across Thailand, starting with a flagship 100MW greenfield project.

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) announced on Tuesday it has formed a partnership with technology solutions provider DWP Technologies to modernize its data centre infrastructure with software-driven enterprise and mid-tier storage platforms from Dell Technologies.

A Brazilian renewable energy company, Casa dos Ventos, has been given the go-ahead from the country’s power grid regulator for a 300-megawatt data centre project in the Pecem port complex in Ceara, northeastern Brazil.

A major partnership focused on a data centre conversion project in Poland says it has completed the successful early repositioning of a logistics property in Warsaw into a leading data centre.

South Korean telco KT Corp reportedly signed a partnership deal on Tuesday with Vietnam’s Viettel Group worth KRW130 billion (US$95 million) to collaborate on developing AI in Vietnam, to include construction of AI data centres.

The launch of a sovereign AI ecosystem in Malaysia that allegedly uses Huawei GPU chips took another twist on Wednesday when the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry (MITI) issued a statement clarifying that the initiative is not a government project, and that Malaysia is compliant with export control laws governing chipsets.