Africa’s largest fibre network provider, Liquid Telecom, has raised US$307 million from shareholders to expand its data centre business.
The new investment includes an additional US$40 million equity from the CDC Group, the UK’s development finance institution; a second CDC investment in Liquid, after a US$180 million equity investment in 2018, which gave CDC a 10% stake in Liquid.
Owned by Zimbabwean billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa, Liquid plans to employ the new funds to expand its pan-African data centre operation business, Africa Data Centres, in response to the growing demand from large tech companies such as Amazon and Google for data storage and cloud-based applications in Africa.