Raxio — Dar es Salaam AI Data Center

Raxio Tanzania, scheduled to open in 2026, will be Tanzania’s first carrier-neutral Tier III data center and one of the pivotal nodes in East Africa’s emerging cloud infrastructure corridor. Located in Dar es Salaam — Tanzania’s commercial capital and largest city with over 7 million people — the facility addresses a critical infrastructure gap in one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital economies.

Raxio Group is an Africa-focused data center developer and operator backed by DIF Capital Partners (a Dutch infrastructure fund) and supported by $100 million in financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private sector arm. The IFC financing reflects the development finance community’s recognition that data center infrastructure is foundational to emerging market economic development — cloud AI workloads in African markets depend on in-country compute the same way they depend on fiber connectivity and mobile networks.

Tanzania presents a compelling case for data center investment. The country has grown at approximately 6-7% GDP annually for the past decade, powered by tourism, agriculture, and a rapidly digitizing economy led by mobile money adoption (M-Pesa Tanzania, Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa). Tanzania’s mobile money ecosystem is one of the most developed in Sub-Saharan Africa — over 70% of adults use mobile financial services — generating enormous volumes of transaction data requiring AI fraud detection, credit scoring, and regulatory reporting infrastructure. These workloads currently process through South Africa or Kenya, introducing latency and cross-border data transfer compliance challenges.

Dar es Salaam’s geographic position makes it a natural hub for multiple East African landlocked countries. The Dar es Salaam Corridor road and rail network connects Tanzania to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Rwanda. Hyperscaler connectivity to these markets routes through Tanzania’s submarine cable landing stations — the EASSy, SEACOM, and DARE cables land in Dar es Salaam, making it East Africa’s second-most connected internet hub after Mombasa, Kenya.

The facility will be designed to carrier-neutral standards, enabling multiple network providers to co-locate and cross-connect — a critical design choice for a market where enterprise customers require multiple telecommunications redundancy paths and where international hyperscalers need interconnection with local African network operators.

Capacity: ~10 MW initial phase · Financing: $100M IFC + DIF Capital Partners · Cables: EASSy, SEACOM, DARE cable access · Standard: Tier III carrier-neutral