The money going into African connectivity is increasingly neither African nor Western.
WIOCC Group said on 1 September 2026 that it had signed a shareholder subscription agreement with the Africa Finance Corporation and Vision International Investment Company, a Saudi infrastructure investor known as Vision Invest, under which the two will put a combined $300 million into the business. The agreement was signed at the LEAP technology exhibition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
WIOCC operates in more than 30 African countries and runs one of the continent’s larger open-access infrastructure platforms, spanning subsea capacity, terrestrial fibre and, through its Open Access Data Centres arm, colocation.
Where the money is going
Chris Wood, group chief executive of WIOCC, named 3 uses: accelerating data centre deployment and consolidation, expanding the open-access terrestrial fibre footprint, and investing in new subsea assets. The last of those is the layer that connects the continent to everywhere else, a market in which European landing points have been courting African traffic directly.
That is the whole physical stack, and the ordering is notable: data centres come first, which is consistent with where the constraint has moved. Building routes is no longer the binding problem in most African markets; having somewhere to land compute and the power to run it is increasingly the binding problem. Our reporting on how data centres are reshaping national power procurement covers the same squeeze from the utility side.
The data centre arm is the part of the group most visible to the market. OADC has been standardising its Johannesburg build on higher-density power and cooling equipment, the sort of specification that only makes sense if you expect AI-era rack densities rather than conventional colocation.
Gulf capital moves into African infrastructure
The more interesting half of the deal is the second name on it. AFC is a known quantity in African infrastructure finance. Vision Invest is a Saudi infrastructure developer, and its presence, along with a signing at a Riyadh trade show, fits into a broader pattern of Gulf capital taking positions in African digital assets rather than only in energy and logistics.
“The Africa we build must be connected, competitive and equipped to create value from the digital economy, not only consume it,” said Samaila Zubairu, president and chief executive of AFC, arguing that fibre, data centres and subsea cables now sit alongside transport corridors and energy networks as essential infrastructure.
Omar Al-Midani, president and chief executive of Vision Invest, framed the case in demographic terms, pointing to a continent expected to hold more than a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.
An unusual shareholder register
What makes WIOCC an unusual recipient is who already owns it. Its shareholders include Uganda Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, Dalkom Somalia, Mozambique’s TMCEL, Zanzibar Telecom, Botswana Fibre Networks, the Lesotho Communications Authority, ONATEL, TelOne and Telkom Kenya, as well as the International Finance Corporation and African Capital Alliance.
That register is effectively a consortium of national operators, several of them state-linked, holding a stake in shared regional infrastructure. It is a structure that has proved durable, even as individual national carriers have struggled to fund cross-border capacity alone.
The gap is the investment case
The announcement cites International Telecommunication Union figures, putting African internet use at 35.7% of the population in 2025, compared with a global average of 73.6%. That gap is the investment case, and it has been for a decade. What has changed is that the money is now being directed toward compute and the buildings that house it, not only to the routes between them.
Neither a closing date nor the resulting shareholding was disclosed.
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