UK based Zimbabwean Billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa, has revealed that data prices will go down by up to 85% in the next three years.
Speaking in a recent interview with new shareholder, IFC, Masiyiwa said the days when people in Africa had to borrow money from the bank to buy data are over.
He revealed that Liquid Telecoms, which is now providing the backbone for almost all African Telecommunications companies, will be commissioning three new under sea cables within the next three years.
Liquid Telecoms is also building 25 new hyperscale datacentres across Africa to satisfy the needs of of partners such as Google and Facebook.
Please click on the video below to watch he full interview.
Transcript
Strive Masiyiwa
Well first of all, welcome to London and to cop 26. It’s been great to see you guys in the city. But, you know, and of course, we also welcome you as a shareholder after this historic investment of almost $250 million, which we have received from you this year. We have a long relationship with IFC as you know, because we both are mandated to help develop the the African continent and so we are, we are very excited about this investment. Thank you for me, for the support and the confidence in us.
… Yes, of course you know, for us to really become part of the mainstream, digital global economy, we have to provide the infrastructure, you know, we can’t talk our way to it. We have to do it.
And what we’ve done as Liquid is to build the the ground zero, the base infrastructure, we have built a fiber optic network that runs now through more than 30 African countries 100,000 kilometres, it is one of the largest terrestrial fiber networks in the whole world.
It crosses from east to west, north to south. We’ve completed Cape Town to Cairo. We’ve done port Sudan to Dhaka. We have fiber capacity. Running through these countries.
And this fiber infrastructure allows the building of things like your mobile networks, for your mobile networks to operate.
They run off our digital backbone. So our customers are your day to day mobile operators, MTN Vodacom around all these companies.
We are their backbone, but we are also providing the backbone for the development of E commerce, the internet the use for E commerce, for health for education.
We’re connecting schools, universities, and with the support that we’re now getting from the IFC as long term patient capital. We’re now able to go into areas where we would not normally go as a purely commercial player.
We’re beginning now to go into deep rural areas, provide connectivity for schools, hospitals, and make it possible really, for our young people to come on to the digital economy more cheaply. So creating a more cost effective digital infrastructure
… Sometimes, you know some of the silent parts of our business, our data center business, really began in South Africa, where these big tech companies from the United States started to come to us to say we would like to have infrastructure to store data on the ground in Africa, some of the biggest tech companies started to request this and we said, Okay, we’ll build them for you.
So we build data centes, and they just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And so today we operate data centers. across the entire region. We are in southern Africa. We are in East Africa. We just completed the biggest data center in Nigeria. And now with the support that you have given us, almost all the support that you have given us in this part of a capital raise we have done we’re now building data centers in all the major economies. So in really we intend to build up to 25, what we call hyperscale data centers, which are the really the big ones in all the major cities of Africa. So it’s a really it’s a major initiative for us.
… Of course, you know, all our fiber that we build across Africa, connecting every African country doesn’t mean anything if we’re not connected to the global economy.
So our terrestrial fiber network interconnects to undersea cables, and every undersea cable that goes around Africa is linked to us. We are either shareholders or we are the largest capacity buyers.
So we are working now closely with Facebook and Google for the introduction of two cables, which will begin to land off the West African coast, early next year coming into the major cities like Dhaka, Cote d’Ivoire, Abidjan, Accra, Lagos all the way down to Cape Town, and then a year later a new cable will come through from Facebook, which will go right around the continent.
And again, we are the leading party for those cables to take them into the rest of Africa.
Now our partners such as Facebook and Google, their business model requires low cost data is not any more about data, selling data as a business, but selling services we want people not to make money on data, but to make money on the services that run off data.
So we are working now to lower the cost of data in an African city or home by 85% or more.
So this is a major initiative we are developing particularly with Google. We’ve already launched in Cape Town and in Kenya.
And we intend to scale from next year. Until every major city or town in Africa you can sit down and download your data. Watch your soccer match without having to borrow money from the bank to do it.
… Mark, you know that data centers are massive power consumption. Our data centers in South Africa already over 15 megawatts and we’re taking that to 100 megawatts in the next three to four years. That’s, that’s the power consumption of some countries or towns.
So these data centers, they take a lot of power. So we have to be careful from day one. That we don’t end up powering them with fossil fuels. So we have built our own power systems for data centers. We use solar panels, and we work with Tesla in the United States as our partner to provide the battery systems so these are these are netzero data centers, they do not use fossil fuel, or even in countries where we build them even we also insist on access to things like hydro power to ensure that they do not contribute to the global climate change problems that we’re all facing.
… You know, we need to tackle the skills gap. That is really number one. You know, we got to make sure that our young people are fully equipped for the future.
Digital Skills AI, you know, you and I were discussing earlier, training young people in AI we need African engineers we need to have young people with PhDs.
AI is now it’s arrived. So we got to deal with the digital skills gap. We’ve got to deal with the energy deficit. The technology to has arrived.
There is really no reason today. Why our villages and our towns don’t have electricity. This is a challenge we can address using renewable solar batteries over the next 10 years that no one in Africa does not have electricity.
And I’m not talking anymore about little lamps and lights. That was for another generation. No, we’re talking here about enough electricity to watch television, to run cottage industries, all sorts of activities because we need economic activity we need to create jobs. So at the heart of everything we do is to create jobs and to spur entrepreneurship, because we are not going to create jobs without changing the entrepreneurial culture and drive of how young people we don’t need people to be crossing the Sahara in the Mediterranean.
Africa offers extraordinary opportunities, but we’ve got to train skill up our people. educate our young people. And the technologies are there. And this is why we’re building this kind of infrastructure together so that they have a platform to stand on….
