MTN Group is handing a Dubai-based data centre developer the wheel on a new venture aimed at building 150 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity across South Africa and Nigeria, according to a report by Capacity. The telecoms group is taking only a minority stake in the new joint entity, Africa Data Hub Holding Limited, while the external partner supplies both capital and technical expertise.
That partner is Tarek Al Ashram, founder of Gulf Data Hub, a data centre developer he established in 2011 with an operating track record across the Middle East. MTN Group chief executive Ralph Mupita described the scope deliberately narrowly: “For now, only in South Africa and Nigeria, we are in that partnership, looking at 150MW as phase 1. We will build out as demand requires.” Mazen Mroué, chief executive of MTN Group’s Digital Infrastructure unit, is also named alongside Mupita as a lead on the deal.
Why MTN wants a minority stake, not control
MTN’s choice to take a minority position rather than build the capacity itself is a specific, deliberate bet. Building hyperscale AI data centre capacity is capital-intensive in a way that stretches even a group MTN’s size, and Al Ashram’s Gulf Data Hub brings both the balance sheet depth and the specialised construction and operations expertise that a telecoms group, whose core competency is running mobile networks rather than power-hungry AI compute facilities, would otherwise have to build from scratch. Diluting ownership in exchange for capital and expertise is a trade MTN has made elsewhere in its infrastructure business, most visibly through Bayobab, the group’s own digital connectivity arm, which is also a shareholder in the new entity and will provide connectivity and go-to-market support once the facilities come online.
The timing lines up with a broader wave of AI infrastructure investment flowing into South Africa this year. Microsoft has committed roughly R5.4 billion to expand its local cloud and AI footprint by 2027, Amazon Web Services is working through a R30.4 billion multi-year commitment, and Equinix has separately announced a $438 million plan to build additional South African data centre capacity on 327,000 square metres of land it has already secured. Set against those numbers, MTN’s 150MW phase 1 target is a modest opening move, but the structure, a dedicated joint venture rather than an in-house build, suggests MTN sees data centre infrastructure as a long-term platform business worth a dedicated vehicle rather than a side project bolted onto its existing mobile network operations.
The choice of South Africa and Nigeria as the first two markets is not incidental either. Both are the continent’s largest economies and MTN’s two biggest markets by subscriber base, giving the group an existing commercial relationship and regulatory familiarity to build from rather than entering an unfamiliar jurisdiction from zero. South Africa in particular already carries the largest data centre footprint on the continent, with roughly 55 facilities built to date, though the country’s own power constraints have repeatedly been flagged by analysts as the real ceiling on how much of that AI-driven data centre boom it can actually capture, a tension this site has covered before in the context of Cape Town’s own hyperscale data centre rezoning pause.
What phase 1’s 150MW figure does not resolve is the same power question hanging over every other AI data centre announcement in the country this year: capacity on paper still depends on Eskom, or an equivalent private generation arrangement, actually being able to deliver the electricity a facility of that scale requires, reliably, for years at a stretch. MTN’s own statement that it will “build out as demand requires” reads as much like an acknowledgment of that constraint as a growth ambition, phase 2 exists conceptually, but nobody involved is committing to a number until phase 1 proves the model works end to end.
For MTN specifically, the deal also marks a notable shift in how the group thinks about its own infrastructure assets. Telecoms operators have traditionally treated towers, fibre and data centres as sunk costs necessary to run a mobile network, not as standalone businesses in their own right. MTN has already moved some way down that path by carving Bayobab out as a separate connectivity unit able to sell capacity to third parties rather than only serving MTN’s own network. Africa Data Hub Holding extends the same logic one step further: rather than building AI data centre capacity purely to support MTN’s own future cloud or AI ambitions, the group is structuring it as a joint venture explicitly designed to sell capacity to whichever hyperscalers, enterprises or AI companies need it, with MTN’s minority stake functioning more like a strategic investment in a platform business than a capital project to support its core telecoms operations.
That distinction matters for how the deal should be read. A telecoms operator building its own data centre to support its own cloud unit is a defensive move, protecting existing revenue against a competitor doing the same. A telecoms operator taking a minority stake in a dedicated joint venture, backed by an experienced Gulf operator and sized to serve the broader market rather than one customer, is closer to a bet that African AI infrastructure demand over the next five years will outstrip what any single operator’s balance sheet could fund alone, and that being an early minority shareholder in the vehicle serving that demand is worth more than owning 100% of a smaller, self-funded facility.
