As part of its broader vision to digitize Africa, Google plans to open a new cloud region in Cape Town, South Africa.

Alistair Mokoena, Google's South Africa country director says this is one of the pivotal moments in Google's expansion in Africa.

He said. "We are at a point where the plan to establish a data center region in South Africa is going to happen, and these things take about two years to materialize. We compete with the best in the world, and a big part of being competitive is about investing in infrastructure."

"In the kind of space we are operating in, we have to have a data center – we are dealing with data, and we have cloud customers that rely on us for data-related services – so data centers make sense, and in the medium- to long-term, those plans have to come on stream."

According to reports from June, the upcoming Africa Data Centers (ADC) facility in Cape Town will be the location of Google's data center.

ADC has announced its plan to open a new data center, 20MW, occupying an area of 15,000 square meters with eight data halls. Construction is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter of 2022, with the end of construction occurring in 2023.

Approximately two years ago, Google informed ITWeb that it had no plans to establish a cloud region or data center in Africa. The reverse is the case today, as the tech giant aims to change the African market dynamically. They are the last major US cloud players to storm the South African data center market.

Microsoft opened an Azure Region in Johannesburg in 2019. Unfortunately, the region was opened alongside a Cape Town region that no longer exists. As a result, Cape Town was removed from the list of regions at the start of 2021, possibly reclassified as a 'reserve access region' as was the case with the Stavanger region in Norway.

First announced in 2018, Amazon Web Service launched a region in Cape Town in 2020. They also have an Edge location in Johannesburg. Oracle has one cloud region in Johannesburg, which opened at the start of the year. The company aims to have customers in every country in at least two cloud regions for better disaster recovery.