Bridging the Gauteng Gap: Africa Data Centres and Oni-Tel Bet on High-Speed Interconnects

Africa Data Centres is doubling down on its South African footprint through a new partnership with Oni-Tel Fibre Networks. This collaboration aims to link the Midrand and Samrand campuses via Oni-Tel’s Infinity platform, a dedicated fibre interconnection system designed for the high-stakes demands of modern data movement.

The move addresses a growing bottleneck in the region. As local enterprises shift more weight onto cloud services and AI workloads, the physical infrastructure underneath those bits and bytes has to keep up. Africa Data Centres CEO Adil El Youssefi pointed out that businesses need dependable, scalable connectivity that stays within trusted local environments. This partnership provides exactly that: a direct, low-latency path that avoids the lag often associated with more fragmented network routes.

The Infinity Advantage

Oni-Tel’s Infinity platform is not just a standard service agreement. It is a purpose-built fibre interconnection platform designed specifically for high-density environments. By focusing on the Midrand and Samrand link, the partnership supports Africa Data Centres’ massive expansion. The Midrand facility alone is currently scaling by an extra 10MW to reach a 20MW total capacity, built to rigorous Tier-4 standards.

Oni-Tel is bringing dark fibre solutions to the table, which gives customers a level of control and security that standard managed services often lack. For the tenants at Africa Data Centres, this means more than just a faster internet connection. It opens up carrier-grade performance for financial institutions and mobile operators who cannot afford even a millisecond of unnecessary downtime. Dark fibre allows these tenants to use their own equipment to light the fibre, ensuring they do not share bandwidth with the public internet.

Future-Proofing for the AI Explosion

The timing of this partnership coincides with a projected explosion in the South African AI market. With the sector expected to grow significantly by the end of 2026, the demand for GPU-heavy workloads is skyrocketing. AI training requires massive amounts of data to move between servers instantly. Standard connectivity creates choke points that can render expensive GPU clusters idle, but this high-speed local interconnect removes those barriers.

Ellisha Gobind, Chief Commercial Officer at Oni-Tel, framed the Infinity platform as a way for businesses to stay ahead in a competitive digital landscape. By integrating this into strategically important hubs like Midrand, the two companies are essentially building a more resilient nervous system for South Africa’s digital economy.

Staying Neutral in a Crowded Market

Africa Data Centres is navigating a market projected to reach billions by the end of the decade. They are currently facing off against global giants who are investing heavily in local infrastructure. By partnering with Oni-Tel, Africa Data Centres reinforces its position as a vendor-neutral player.

This strengthens the broader ecosystem of vendor-neutral data centres across the continent. When connectivity providers and data centre operators align like this, the result is a more flexible environment where companies can scale their infrastructure without hitting a wall of bandwidth constraints or security risks.