AFRICLOUD has opened its third African region in Lagos, expanding its cloud infrastructure footprint while introducing local-currency payments across West, Central, East and Southern Africa.
The new Lagos region allows businesses to run servers and storage in Nigeria while also accessing infrastructure in South Africa and Portugal through a single account. The expansion is designed to address three common challenges facing African businesses using cloud infrastructure: network traffic leaving the continent, international payment requirements and data residency concerns.
With infrastructure based in Lagos, Nigerian customers can keep compute and storage within Nigeria, while the region also serves businesses across cities including Accra, Abidjan, Lomé, Douala and Ouagadougou. AFRICLOUD says traffic from landlocked West African markets can remain on terrestrial West African fibre rather than routing through Europe.
The company’s Johannesburg region serves Southern and East Africa, while Lisbon provides infrastructure for North Africa and Europe, with connectivity to Brazil through a direct subsea route. AFRICLOUD says its measurements show 42 of the 53 African countries assessed can reach one of its regions within a best-case round-trip time of 70 milliseconds.
The company has also expanded payment options for African customers. Businesses across West, Central, East and Southern Africa can pay in local currencies, including the naira, cedi, shilling and CFA francs, using local cards, bank transfers, USSD or mobile money.
AFRICLOUD says mobile money is available in 12 African countries, while it also accepts cards, PayPal and more than 300 cryptocurrencies. The approach is intended to reduce the need for international cards when purchasing cloud infrastructure.
Data residency is another part of the regional model. Nigerian workloads can operate under the Nigeria Data Protection Act, South African workloads under POPIA and European workloads under EU law, with customers selecting the location of their servers through the same dashboard.
AFRICLOUD Founder Oluniyi Ajao said the company’s expansion is intended to give African businesses access to infrastructure that is geographically closer, locally payable and aligned with applicable data protection requirements.
All three regions operate on the same platform, featuring AMD EPYC processors, all-NVMe storage and IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity. AFRICLOUD says new servers can be brought online in about two minutes, while dedicated servers are available across the three regions. Support is provided around the clock through chat and email.
