ALIX PRESSLEY DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC CONTENT,

INTELLIGENT GLOBAL MEDIA

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to move closer to its Vision 2030 objectives, while investments are already underway to support the deployment of Africa’ s digital trade backbone. As expected, the global consensus remains unchanged: Artificial Intelligence will continue to dominate enterprise strategies and economic growth worldwide.

Over the past 12 months, the data centre sector has been thrust firmly into the spotlight, positioning it at the heart of the AI economy. This explosive growth shows no sign of slowing, presenting ongoing challenges for data centre operators who must balance rising demand with increasing pressure around power availability and cooling efficiency.

The Middle East data centre market in particular is forecast to grow by almost 50 %, as cited by Turner and Townsend. Sustainable design and innovation have helped address early concerns around the region’ s hot, dry climate, making it an increasingly attractive location for new developments.

However, water scarcity and extreme temperatures remain critical considerations. According to Kearney, continued progress will depend on strategic innovation, sustained investment, clear regulatory frameworks and close collaboration between governments and the private sector. It will be interesting to see how this emerging hub of innovation navigates these challenges as the region’ s technology profile becomes ever more sophisticated.

Africa is also gaining momentum with the rollout of its ADAPT initiative( Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade). IOTA states that the programme will integrate seamless payments, secure data access and digital identities into a single digital public infrastructure

– enabling African nations to trade with greater transparency, security and efficiency.

Elsewhere in Africa was the signing of an MoU between Togo and Mozambique. Clifford Chance, the global law firm, highlighted that the agreement focuses on joint capacity building, intelligence sharing and the development of harmonised cyberdefence protocols to strengthen national and regional resilience.

In addition, the governments of Nigeria and Sierra Leone signed two digital cooperation agreements in November: one establishing a roadmap for Digital Transformation and another creating a crossborder AI research and talent partnership. Africa is clearly a region to watch as these initiatives begin to take shape.

The channel ecosystem across Africa and the Middle East is expected to pivot in parallel. Major cloud providers are increasingly partnering with local infrastructure and telecoms operators to deliver services in markets where hyperscale data centres are not yet established.

As data consumption accelerates, the need for local data residency becomes ever more critical. Last year, Orange Middle East & Africa and Amazon Web Services announced plans to bring advanced cloud technologies to customers in Morocco and Senegal in 2025. Over the next 12 months, we will begin to see this investment materialise, enabling startups, enterprises and public sector organisations to securely process and store data locally, build lowlatency applications and accelerate Digital Transformation using AWS services.

These deployments also mark the first AWS Wavelength Zones directly accessible via both wireless and wireline Internet connections, allowing customers to run applications on AWS compute and storage hosted within Orange data centres.

An exciting year lies ahead – and 2026 may well prove to be one for the history books. p

18 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www. intelligentcio. com