African businesses that rely on Google’s cloud should get faster, more reliable access to it after Liquid earned a top-tier rating for how its network connects to Google.
Liquid C2, a business of pan-African technology group Cassava Technologies, said on 29 June 2026 that it had reached gold-level status in Google’s Verified Peering Provider (VPP) programme, which vets how reliably a network provider interconnects with Google. Liquid called itself the most widely perceived gold partner on the continent.
What peering buys
Peering is a direct connection between two networks, here Liquid’s and Google’s, that lets traffic bypass the congested, shared paths of the public internet. For customers, Liquid says this means lower latency and more consistent performance when using Google Workspace, Google Cloud, and AI workloads, rather than delays caused by routing traffic the long way round.
The gold qualification spans Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi and London, giving the network a geographically spread, high-availability footing across its main African hubs and a European gateway.
“In today’s cloud-first economy, network performance is a key driver of competitiveness,” said Vinay Hiralall, chief commercial officer at Liquid C2. He said the status strengthened the company’s ability to deliver “consistent, low-latency access to Google services at scale” for African enterprises expanding into global markets.
Deepening the Google tie
The accreditation builds on a widening relationship with Google, which recently included the launch of what Liquid describes as Africa’s first Google Cloud-powered Partner Experience Centre in Johannesburg.
For Liquid, the move fits a broader push to position its network as the on-ramp to global cloud platforms for African companies, alongside its cloud and cybersecurity expansion across the continent. As more African workloads move to hyperscaler clouds, the quality of the pipe between the user and the data centre is becoming as important as the data centre itself, a theme running through the continent’s data-centre build-out.
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