Agogbua: We Will Deliver World-class Data Centre Facilities

Founder and CEO, Kasi Cloud Data Centres, Johnson Agogbua, speaks about the near-completion stage of the Tier III data centres located in Lekki, Lagos, which promise to deliver world-class data centre services to Nigeria and to other West African countries, when completed. Emma Okonji presents the excerpts:

You are building massive data centres in Nigeria that will become the biggest in West Africa, when completed. Can you tell us more about it and the expected date of completion and the possible launch date?

Yes, Kasi is building massive data centres in Nigeria, precisely in Lekki, that can serve Nigeria and other West African countries, when completed. We are currently at the completion stage and we hope to launch before the second half of 2026.

The data centre is seated on 4.2 hectares of land, with minimum 32 megawatts critical IT load of power that goes to computers, routers, storage systems, which means we are bringing more power than that.

The building is designed to have two redundant fiberisers, and our fibers have to be buried at 1.8 meters below ground level.The data centres have commercial area, security area, operations area, reception area, including conference rooms and meeting rooms, among others.The building has four floors that will house four independent data centres. The cooling system is powerful. It absorbs heat and the heat rises through huge pipes, all the way to the chiller. So, the chiller will send chilled water, and these will return warm water, which the chiller will treat. So, at every point in time, the data centre will remain cool.

The data centre is designed to have four electrical lines and everything is radially configured.

How is Kasi Cloud Data Centre designed to meet the local needs of Nigerians and Africans?

Indeed, our fundamental focus when we started the design of our data centre, was that it must be world class. Anything less will not suffice. Our ultimate goal is that if you go to the UK, you go to Singapore and other developed countries of the world, what you see there you should be able to see here in Nigeria.Secondly, we have good plans to future proof our data centre. We know that cloud is where the action is but we also know that AI is the biggest future application period for data centres. So we designed it to accommodate any scale cloud and any scale AI. We designed it to be able to accommodate two orders of magnitude power density at any point. And that is an unheard of design target.So we designed it such that users can do 1 kilowatt, 10 kilowatt and 100 kilowatts per rack, minimum, and we have delivered on that. And it takes a lot of work to arrange the mechanical, the electrical, the plumbing infrastructure, as well as the fiber infrastructure to accommodate this. It was a tall order and it took our team two and a half solid years to be able to lock down the design and build to that requirement.So what we have in Kasi are four different data centers on the four floors of the building.

It’s nice to know that the four data centres on each floor are independent of each other. How many racks can each of the four data centres take?

What we’ve built is a share-nothing architecture facility where each data centre does not share anything with the other data centre other than the common building itself. So you can be rest assured that if you deploy across the floors, you will have different availability zones even within our campus. Again, it is a prerequisite scale to be able to deploy cloud. So each of the data centre floors has two massive data halls, and when users deploy across them, they should be able to do anywhere from 1,100 racks to 1,400 racks per data centre. So if you multiply that by four, you get a sense of the huge capacity that can be accommodated in our facility. Each one of them can run at eight kilowatt per rack and they can go all the way up to 100 kilowatt per rack. The power density that you select will decide the number of racks.

The latest McKinsey report says African data centers can generate between $20 and $30 billion dollars by 2030, in terms of revenue. How can Kasi Cloud Data Centre tap into Africa’s projected revenue stream for data centres?

It’s very simple. We have to deliver the Kasi Cloud Data Centre facility for cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) operations, and that is the most direct way to key into it. We have to further build it for the ecosystem that either consume or provide services to Cloud and AI, such as the enterprises, the telcos, and other service providers. So if we cater to these constituents, and we give them what they want, the ecosystem will easily key into the $30 billion projected revenue stream for Africa data centres. The ecosystem wants unstoppable scale, and the players want amazing deployment velocity. They want ultra-performance and they want proximity to critical elements to make these data centers feasible. The first proximity is power. So we are not just close to power, but power is in our facility. We have the largest substation of any data center in Africa inside of Kasi, capable of delivering 100 megawatts to our campus. That’s fundamental. Next proximity is the critical fiber paths. So we have cable landing stations all along the coastal road and our data centres sit right there next to them. Another is the main artery of our national fiber, and we sit right next to it. And then we have conduits that bring all of those together into Kasi Cloud Data Centres. So if we can do these things for customers in the ecosystem and deliver on that promise, then we can key directly into the projected revenue stream.

The Mckinsey report also stated that for Africa to generate that type of revenue by 2030, Africa would need to invest close $ 20 billion dollars. So what are the investment plans of Kasi in terms of data centre, and how will such investment translate into economic growth in the future?

Indeed, we’ve already done that. We looked at Nigeria and decided that we’re going to invest heavily in our data centres in Lagos. We’re going to invest heavily in South-South region of Nigeria and we are going to invest heavily in Abuja also.So we acquired land in three places. We then further decided that we’re going to build up Lagos data centre first and deliver a world class facility to West Africa. Because we believe that Lagos will anchor West Africa. Nigeria will be the digital hub of not just West Africa, but parts of Central Africa, all the way down to Angola. So we have to build to that scale, and what we’ve done is that we looked at many instruments and we looked at many partners. Some from the US, including the National Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) in Nigeria, that have confidence in Kasi. They have been solid capital partners for us. We have now become quite choosy on who will be a capital partner to Kasi, because what we want is long term capital investment in Kasi that can build alongside with us. We are looking for partnerships not transactional entities.

Since data centers are built with standards, to what extent does the Kasi Data Centre meet international standards in terms of reliability and efficiency?

Indeed there are two metrics that are very important for you to appreciate the standards we maintain in our data centre facilities. One is the power efficiency metric. We’re building to be at or below 1.45 Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and we will continue to improve on it as we introduce solar.

As we introduce liquid cooling, we’ll shift further on that and get it closer. So that’s really a hallmark of great design and great execution. Another one that’s really important is what the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN requires of us, which is to be certified at a Tier III level. It doesn’t mean that we cannot do more than Tier III. It just means that we are compliant with what CBN requires of the banks where they deploy. Ultimately, the hyperscales decide the service level agreement (SLA) that they have with us or with any other data centre operators. The next item that’s really important is all the ISO standards and specifications. We are working on the prerequisite ones as we move into operations. So you will see us operate at the highest standard compliance level.

In all of these, how much have you invested so far and what are your investment financing models?

Let me put it this way. You know, we’ve put tens of millions of dollars so far into the facility. The way to think about it is that for every megawatt that you bring in, you approximately spend a huge amount of money.Some build at a higher cost, but that’s about the range. We’re a lot more capital efficient in the way we build and deploy. So I will leave that with you.The way we think about our funding model is very straightforward. It mirrors how large scale startups do work globally. We went with those that are trusted in our industry to be the early investors because we need them to be partners with us.We need them to advise us. So big investment banks came along in day one, and the next is to bring institutions that have vested interest in development across Africa.So we brought in the sovereign investment authority and they’ve been wonderful. I mean, they’ve been more than superb working with us.

Now we are about to enter another phase and we’re going to follow that script, where we are bringing institutions that are chartered to develop Africa. We are also bringing institutions whose investments align very well with digital infrastructure and long term capital in Africa.

The total installed data centre capacity for Africa is still low compared to what is obtainable in France. How is Kasi Data Centre positioned to help boost data centre capacity in Africa?We are at the early stages of digital infrastructure development in Africa. We’ve gone through the mobility transition and you saw how rapidly that scaled. We are at the other side of digital infrastructure development for cloud, AI and digital consumption. Africa data centre capacity is less than two per cent of the global data centre footprint, most of which are concentrated in South Africa and South Africa has well over 55 per cent of all data centres deployed in Africa. South Africa is ahead of other African countries for two reasons: One, they started earlier, and two, they build for cloud and supply for cloud, which made South Africa to become a cloud region for hyperscale deployment. Nigeria is the next right place for data centre deployment, because it has the largest population market in Africa.So Kasi Data Centres are positioned to deliver what the cloud operators are asking for in terms of campus wise, building wise, power wise, and so on. And if we can do that, others can also replicate same in their data centre facilities, and the market then becomes quite buoyant. We can then boast that Nigeria can supply to hyperscale and AI. Kasi has taken the lead and we are working with our fellow ecosystem partners, including our competitors, to ensure that supply happens.

The demand for data centre service in Africa, including Nigeria, is on the increase. How can Kasi address the rising demand?

You have asked an extremely important and right question. What we’re doing with our data centre is key, and we’re saying to them, if you cannot build fast enough, come to Kasi to take a space. We will enable others and that is a way to help the ecosystem scale faster. Kasi Data Centre allows us to deliver that velocity not just to enterprises, and not just to hyperscale operators, but also to the entire ecosystem.

Before now, most data generated in Nigeria have been hosted outside of Nigeria, which negates Nigeria’s data sovereignty. How will Kasi help address the issue of data sovereignty in Nigeria?

I have to commend our regulators and policy makers for a job well done in the area of protecting Nigeria’s data sovereignty. I say this because it doesn’t make sense to have all the data sovereignty regulations and policy in the books, without having the instrument to enforce it and regulate it. So it’s slowly moving towards execution stage, and that’s where Kasi comes in. We’re a proof point that we can support data at scale in Nigeria and in West Africa. So those are important proof points for our regulators and our policy makers.