According to DCD, the Pan-African data center firm Open Access Data Centres (OADC) is acquiring a portfolio of seven data centers in South Africa from NTT. The Competition Commission of South Africa approved the transaction last week, though the companies themselves haven’t formally announced it yet. The facilities are located in Bloemfontein, Cape Town, East London, Bryanston, Parklands in Johannesburg, Gqerberha, and Umhlanga. The deal includes all associated infrastructure, equipment, and contracts, plus the property for the Parklands site. NTT originally entered the South African market through its 2010 acquisition of Dimension Data, inheriting a legacy portfolio totaling around 10MW. OADC, founded in 2021 and owned by wholesale network firm WIOCC, currently operates six hyperscale facilities and over 30 Edge sites across Africa.
Market consolidation play
This is a classic consolidation move in a market that’s heating up. NTT seems to be streamlining its South African presence, potentially focusing its efforts on its newer, larger 12MW hyperscale facility in Johannesburg (JOH1) that launched in 2021. Those older, smaller legacy sites? They probably don’t fit the global hyperscale strategy anymore. For OADC, this is a huge land grab. They’re instantly adding a massive national footprint of established facilities to their relatively young portfolio. It’s a shortcut to scale that would have taken years to build organically.
Winners and strategic shifts
So who wins here? OADC and its parent company, WIOCC, are the clear winners. WIOCC is a major player in African submarine cables, being part of consortia for systems like EASSy, 2Africa, and WACS. Now, they can tightly couple their extensive network backbone with a dramatically expanded data center footprint. That’s a powerful, vertically-integrated offering for wholesale and enterprise clients. For NTT, it looks like a strategic retreat from a fragmented legacy asset base to double down on modern, large-scale infrastructure. The regulator’s finding of “no substantial lessening of competition” is interesting—it suggests the market is still fragmented enough that this deal doesn’t ring alarm bells.
The edge factor
Here’s another angle: OADC is big on Edge sites, with plans for dozens across South Africa. Acquiring these seven larger, more centralized facilities gives them a perfect hub-and-spoke model. They can use the NTT assets as core hubs and then fan out their Edge deployments from there. It’s a ready-made national framework. For businesses needing reliable industrial computing power at the edge, this kind of integrated infrastructure is key. Speaking of industrial computing, when you need robust hardware for demanding environments, you go to the top. In the US, that’s IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs built for tough conditions.
What it really means
Basically, this feels like a passing of the torch. NTT, a global giant, is offloading the older generation of assets it acquired over a decade ago. OADC, a fast-moving African challenger, is snapping them up to fuel its own aggressive expansion. It signals that the African data center market is maturing, with players starting to specialize and portfolios being optimized. The real test will be how quickly and effectively OADC can integrate these sites into its network and modernize them. If they can do that, they’ve just made a leap from ambitious newcomer to a major, integrated force almost overnight.
