MTN Group has formed a new company, Africa Data Hub Holding Limited, following a strategic partnership with an undisclosed United Arab Emirates–backed data centre investment platform.

In its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2026, the African telecom giant revealed the strategic partnership, which it said would accelerate the development of its data centre aspirations.

The company outlined plans to enter the AI market alongside the release of its full-year results for 2025. It said the project would be led by its Digital Infrastructure business.

“MTN Digital Infrastructure continued to advance its data centre strategy, laying the groundwork for an expanded AI-enabled rollout plan to support accelerating AI, cloud and enterprise demand,” it said.

It said there was a substantial opportunity for MTN Digital Infrastructure to draw value from the expansion of MTN’s AI-enabled data centre network across Africa.

With African nations increasingly digitising, MTN planned to position its AI infrastructure in spaces where organisations in these countries will turn to the telecom first.

It has shortlisted two countries as priority markets in which it will lead the data centre and AI infrastructure push — South Africa and Nigeria, the continent’s largest digital markets.

As part of this initiative, MTN launched the first phase of its Sifiso Dabengwa Data Centre in Lagos, Nigeria, in mid-2025. At the time, the facility was the largest data centre in West Africa.

In South Africa, MTN already operated several data centres, with one of its primary facilities in Centurion, Gauteng. This facility is one of the group’s core switching and transmission hubs.

It also had data centre switching and enterprise nodes in Randburg, near its headquarters, in Cape Town, and in KwaZulu-Natal at Mtunzini, which connects directly to the 2Africa cable landing.

MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita previously expressed confidence in the potential growth and value that MTN will achieve with its data centre colocation, hosting and AI-infrastructure provider strategy.

“We are hugely excited about Africa’s potential and are well-positioned to leverage our scale, footprint and brand leadership to capture the significant structural growth opportunities identified,” he said.

“We are committed to accelerating our impact and empowering the people, businesses and nation states we serve.”

Africa Data Hub Holding will launch MTN’s AI data centre platform

MTN Group said that Africa Data Hub would combine MTN’s extensive African footprint, market knowledge and infrastructure with international investment backing and specialist data centre expertise.

“Africa Data Hub Holding Limited will serve as the platform through which future digital infrastructure opportunities will be developed and scaled across key African markets,” the company said.

“The agreement marks a significant milestone in the execution of the data centre strategy and supports its ambition to meet growing demand for cloud, enterprise and AI-enabled services across Africa.”

The company is working on an AI-enabled platform to address growing demand for cloud, enterprise and data-intensive services across its markets.

It said that significant progress was made in developing the platform’s investment, operating and partnership model.

MTN Digital Infrastructure also invested in ORAN Development Corporation’s Series A funding round during the reporting period. In March, MTN announced ODC had raised R721 million.

MTN said that ODC is a pioneer in AI-native RAN and the creator of the US-based Odyssey RAN technology platform.

The company is building the “Distributed Compute Grid,” which MTN called the essential AI processing engine for the world’s digital and physical infrastructure.

“This infrastructure serves as the sovereign fabric for the AI-Native era, transforming today’s cell sites into high-performance compute hubs.”

“They are capable of orchestrating everything from autonomous Agentic AI and real-time generative inference to the Physical AI applications that secure and define national infrastructure resilience.”

It said the investment was led by a syndicate of global technology and infrastructure powerhouses, including Booz Allen, Cisco Investments, Nokia, NVIDIA, AT&T, MTN, and Telecom Italia.

MTN said in its results that since the investment, the parties have progressed to joint implementation planning.

“Active collaboration is underway to assess priority use cases, deployment opportunities and commercial models aligned with MTN’s digital infrastructure and Ambition 2030 objectives.”