By Vaughan O’Grady

Vodacom Mozambique is widely reported to be investing US$25 million in a new data centre in the country.

According to the Data Centre Dynamics website, referencing local news sources, the data centre is to be in Matola near the capital Maputo.

Matola has a port and also houses the biggest industrial area in Mozambique. Given its strategic position it’s no surprise that the installation will offer direct access to the 2Africa subsea cable, hosted in Vodacom Mozambique’s equipment room in Matola.

The project will be carried out in three phases. The first phase is set to be completed in July 2024.

Vodacom says its data centre – a carrier-neutral facility – will focus on supporting advanced technology infrastructure with enhanced security measures and energy-efficient initiatives. Other specifications of the data centre have not been reported.

The company reportedly serves more than 10 million customers (about a third of the total population) and last year launched commercial 5G services in Maputo.

Data Centre Dynamics says Vodacom installed a modular data centre in Matola in 2013. As its name suggests, a modular data centre system is a portable method of deploying data centre capacity that can be placed anywhere that capacity is needed.

The company laid the foundation stone for the construction of a Tier III-quality facility in October last year. The company’s CEO, Lucas Chachine, was quoted at the time as saying: “The choice of the municipality of Matola for the installation of the enterprise is allied to the fact that it is an ideal location for disaster recovery operations and allows efficient access to local and global markets.”