Africa’s newest anchor load is digital
Raxio Group is entering Tanzania and has lifted its funding pool to $380 million, with fresh capital from its main shareholders Meridiam and the Roha Group. Each facility the operator builds draws power around the clock at industrial scale, the kind of demand that pulls generation and grid investment in behind it.
Raxio Group expects to open Tanzania’s first carrier-neutral Tier III data centre in Dar es Salaam this year, completing a build it first announced in March 2022. Chief executive Robert Skjødt confirmed the entry and the enlarged funding pool in an interview with Bloomberg, though he did not say how the new money divides between shareholder capital and the debt already on Raxio’s books, a line that includes $100 million committed by the IFC alongside earlier lending from Proparco and the Emerging Africa Asia Infrastructure Fund.
Founded in 2018, the company operates data centres in Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Angola, all certified to the Uptime Institute’s Tier III standard and built for the banks and network operators that keep critical systems in them. Tanzania, the second-largest economy in the East African Community, takes the operating map to a seventh country, and Raxio pointed to the six landlocked neighbours that route traffic through it when the market first went on the plan.
A facility built to that standard is designed to run through every hour of the year behind redundant power and cooling, so each one that opens becomes an industrial customer of whichever grid hosts it. In most of the markets where Raxio operates those grids are still being reinforced, which means an operator promising 99.98% availability has to secure its own power as carefully as its land, and a customer of that size can carry the investment case for new generation with it. Power systems on the continent have long been planned around a single large offtaker, the mine or the smelter whose consumption justified the plant and the lines that followed, and the data centre is now joining that class of anchor load.
Raxio integrates renewable generation at its sites and uses energy-efficient cooling to hold down the electricity and water they draw, and its own materials put secured power capacity and land-banked plots at the base of the build-out. Skjødt came to the company from the power side of the industry, having run the pan-African renewables developer BTE Renewables until ENGIE and Meridiam acquired it, and he has led Raxio since the start of 2025.
He said demand is accelerating across Africa as more business moves online and heavier AI computing begins to arrive, and the largest international cloud companies have been extending their services into these markets. Raxio’s model is metro-edge rather than hyperscale, smaller facilities run by local teams in countries the industry’s biggest builders have passed over.
The raise is sized for growth past a single market, with Skjødt saying the company will keep widening its presence, and he left little doubt where he expects the next wave of customers to come from. “We are beginning to see signs of international cloud providers making plans for Africa,” he said.
