UCA, OADC partner to strengthen Africa’s digital sovereignty

Two tech companies, UniCloud Africa (UCA) and Open Access Data Centres (OADC have sealed a strategic partnership deal to accelerate Africa’s digital transformation and independence.

 Under this partnership, UCA, a leading data centre company in Africa and the premier pan-African sovereign cloud platform will host its enterprise-grade sovereign cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure within OADC’s world-class, carrier-neutral facilities in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.

This collaboration establishes a robust, localised foundation for governments and enterprises to modernise their operations while ensuring absolute data residency and regulatory compliance.

The partnership aligns with UCA’s “One Cloud, One Africa” strategy, which seeks to eliminate the high-latency and compliance risks associated with offshore cloud providers.

By utilizing OADC’s Tier-III certified infrastructure, UCA provides a high-performance environment for mission-critical workloads, supported by a contractual Tier-III certified uptime SLA.

Speaking on the partnership, CEO of UCA, Dr. Krish Ranganath, said: “Our mission is to provide the definitive foundation for Africa’s digital and economic independence.

“By hosting our sovereign infrastructure within OADC’s world-class facilities, we are ensuring that African data remains on African soil. This partnership empowers our clients with low-latency access, local currency billing, and the security of ISO-certified, in-country data management that is tailor-made for the continent’s unique requirements.”

Read Also: Alleged coup: Six arraigned, remanded in DSS' custody as court sets Monday for trial

OADC’s extensive footprint provides UCA with the scale needed to serve key economic hubs:

Nigeria: Leveraging OADC Lagos’s campus to support the country’s booming fintech and enterprise sectors; DRC: Providing much-needed local cloud capacity in Kinshasa to drive the nation’s digital acceleration; and South Africa: Utilising OADC’s expanded national footprint and distributed scale to deliver resilient, geographically separated primary and disaster recovery solutions

Also commenting on the partnership, CEO of OADC, Dr Ayotunde Coker, said: “We firmly believe that fully localised cloud infrastructure is critical for economic growth and Africa’s digital future. OADC is committed to providing the essential building blocks for a truly unified African digital ecosystem. Partnering with UniCloud Africa allows us to support a platform that is driving the next wave of innovation, from AI acceleration to cost-predictability.”

Empowering the next wave of innovation, beyond standard infrastructure, the partnership will support the deployment of UniCloud’s GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), enabling local organisations to harness the power of AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data at scale. With zero data egress fees and billing in local currencies, the collaboration removes the financial barriers often posed by global cloud giants.