Open Access Data Centres, OADC, under the WIOCC Group umbrella, has wrapped up buying seven data centres in South Africa from NTT DATA.
The deal closed back on 31 December 2025, right after getting the green light from the Competition Commission. It is structured as a sale-and-leaseback setup: OADC now owns the buildings and sites, but NTT leases them right back. NTT stays in charge of talking to clients and delivering the actual services, while OADC handles routine facility management operations, including power, cooling, and upkeep.
The seven spots are spread out in places like Bloemfontein, Cape Town, East London, B
ryanston and Parklands up in Joburg, Gqeberha, and Umhlanga around Durban.
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Adding these bumps, OADC’s total capacity in South Africa is past 25 megawatts, which is a solid jump for them. This fits right into what WIOCC has been doing: knitting together subsea cables, land-based fibre, and now more data centre real estate to create a proper end-to-end digital setup across the continent.
South Africa is still the big gateway for a lot of this. Local companies need the capacity, and the big international cloud players keep adding zones here to get closer to users.
Joshua Smythwood, chief strategy & M&A, WIOCC, called it a key piece in pushing carrier-neutral infrastructure harder in SA and beyond.
Meanwhile, NTT seems happy to offload the property side and focus more on the managed services they do best.
South Africa’s data centre market feels ripe for more of these consolidations—fragmentation has held things back a bit, but snapping up existing sites like this speeds up everything, especially when new builds are getting trickier with power shortages and land issues in prime spots.
Read also: Schneider Electric powers data centre shift for AI energy surge
Global money is definitely watching. African data centres used to feel like a side bet, but with data exploding and cloud going mainstream here, these assets are turning into serious portfolio pieces for investors.
Verdant IMAP handled the advisory for OADC on this one (their fourth time working with WIOCC, apparently), and they described the negotiations as pretty involved—lots of back-and-forth on the commercial, legal, and structural bits over months.
Bottom line: WIOCC/OADC is positioning itself as a bigger integrated player just as Africa shifts more toward cloud-first setups.
Expect to see more deals like this as operators chase scale without always starting from scratch.
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