Africa is not be short of ambition. New subsea cables are reshaping connectivity across the continent. Data centre capacity is expanding in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg and beyond. Hyperscalers are circling. Investment capital, both local and international, is moving with greater urgency than at any point in the past decade.

And yet, there is a challenge that predates the AI investment boom and will outlast it: power.

Energy has quietly become the defining constraint on Africa’s digital infrastructure ambitions. Not regulation, not capital, not even last-mile connectivity. Power. The availability of it, the reliability of it, the cost of it, and the regulatory frameworks that determine who can generate, buy and sell it.

The constraint nobody wants to admit

For years, energy has been treated as an operational footnote in the digital infrastructure story, a cost line to be managed, a generator to be fuelled, a grid connection to be applied for and, more often than not, waited on. That framing is no longer adequate.

Grid reliability challenges and connection delays are now a material constraint on the rollout of towers, fibre networks and new data centre capacity across the continent. Fuel and generation costs have risen sharply in recent years, squeezing margins for operators already navigating currency volatility and complex licensing environments. And as the AI-driven demand for compute intensifies, the power requirements of each new facility are scaling faster than the infrastructure available to support them.

The numbers are unforgiving. A modern hyperscale data centre requires tens of megawatts of reliable power. An edge facility might need only a fraction of that, but even modest deployments require grid connections that, in many African markets, are neither fast nor guaranteed. For towercos managing tens of thousands of sites across remote and peri-urban terrain, diesel dependency remains both an environmental liability and a commercial one.

This is not a problem unique to Africa. But the continent faces it at a particular moment of tension, when investment appetite is high, demand signals are strengthening, and the pressure to deliver at scale is more acute than it has ever been.

Building a different kind of energy stack

The industry’s response is not to wait for national grids to catch up. It is to build around them.

Across the continent, operators are accelerating the deployment of hybrid and decentralised energy systems: solar, battery storage, and hybrid configurations that reduce reliance on grid connections and diesel generation. For towercos in particular, the shift is already well under way. What began as a cost-reduction strategy is becoming core infrastructure logic: if you cannot depend on the grid, you engineer your way around it.

Helios Towers, one of the continent’s largest towerco operators, has been among the most public advocates of this transition. The economics are increasingly compelling. Solar and storage costs have fallen dramatically over the past decade, and the operational case for on-site generation (reduced fuel costs, lower emissions, improved uptime) is now straightforward to make. The harder question is how to finance and structure these systems at scale, and what role energy partnerships play in freeing operators to focus on their core business rather than generator maintenance.

That question sits at the centre of a dedicated energy roundtable at ITW Africa this year, which brings together leaders from across the energy and digital infrastructure ecosystem to examine what successful energy partnerships now look like in a shifting operational and regulatory environment. The framing is telling: not whether to outsource energy management, but how.

Regulation determines everything

If the operational response to Africa’s power challenge is increasingly clear, the regulatory environment remains the harder problem.

Who can generate power? Who can sell it, and to whom? How are grid connection timelines and costs managed? What rights do digital infrastructure operators have to build private energy systems, and how are those regulated? These are not abstract policy questions. They determine where towers get built, where data centres open, and where investment capital flows.

Kenya provides a useful lens. KenGen, the country’s dominant power generator, and KETRACO, its transmission company, are both represented at ITW Africa this year, a signal that the conversation between digital infrastructure and the energy sector is becoming more direct.

The broader picture across Africa is one of fragmentation. Licensing frameworks vary significantly between markets. Rights-of-way processes are inconsistently applied. Grid-related approvals continue to slow deployment. For investors and operators pursuing multi-market strategies, this inconsistency is not just an inconvenience — it is a material risk.

The push for regulatory clarity is therefore as much a commercial imperative as it is a policy argument. Predictable regulation enables shared infrastructure models, reduces deployment costs, and creates the conditions for long-term investment. Without it, every market requires a bespoke approach, and the economics of scale that underpin Africa’s infrastructure ambitions become significantly harder to realise.

Data centres: where energy becomes competitive

For the data centre sector specifically, energy is no longer just a cost consideration. It is becoming a competitive differentiator.

As African data centre markets mature and the pace of that maturation is accelerating, with operators such as Africa Data Centres, iXAfrica, Open Access Data Centres, Rack Centre and Raxio Group all expanding — the industry is converging on a set of design principles that place energy efficiency at their core. Cooling strategies, power usage effectiveness targets, and the integration of on-site generation are now central to how new facilities are specified, built and operated.

The calculus is straightforward. A facility that can demonstrate reliable, efficient, and increasingly green power has a structural advantage in attracting hyperscaler and enterprise tenants who are themselves under pressure to meet sustainability commitments. In markets where grid reliability is uncertain, on-site power resilience is not a premium feature, it is a baseline requirement.

This also shapes where data centres are built. Location decisions are increasingly driven by the intersection of connectivity, land and power availability. Markets that can offer all three, with a regulatory environment that does not frustrate deployment, will attract disproportionate investment. Those who cannot will find themselves watching capital flow elsewhere.

The road to Nairobi

Africa’s digital infrastructure story has entered a new phase. The foundational arguments that connectivity drives economic growth, that data centre investment creates jobs and enables digital services, and that public-private partnership is essential to scaling infrastructure at speed are no longer contested. They are accepted. The question is execution, and execution depends on power.

The leaders gathered in Nairobi at ITW Africa will bring different perspectives on how to solve that problem: towerco operators managing hybrid energy transitions at thousands of sites; data centre executives designing facilities that must perform reliably in challenging grid environments; energy investors structuring long-term power purchase agreements; regulators trying to align national energy policy with the demands of a fast-moving digital economy.

What they share is an understanding that no amount of fibre, no volume of hyperscaler demand, and no depth of investment capital will be sufficient if the energy infrastructure needed to support it is not in place. Africa’s digital ambitions are real. The power to realise them is the work of this moment.

ITW Africa

ITW Africa is the continent’s leading connectivity and digital infrastructure event for leaders to do business. Bringing together carriers, data centre operators, fibrecos, hyperscalers and investors, it’s a meeting-led environment built for real commercial outcomes and meaningful deal-making.

Co-located with Datacloud Africa, it connects you to the full ecosystem, from networks to data centres, cloud and AI. It’s also where you can spot where capacity is expanding, demand is rising, and deals are happening – before your competitors.

For more information, click here.

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