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October 14, 2026
Wingu News
For businesses operating across East Africa, deciding where to place critical digital infrastructure is becoming an increasingly strategic question. Data centres are no longer simply secure buildings that house servers. Their location can affect connectivity, cloud performance, resilience, regulatory compliance, access to customers and the ability to expand into neighbouring markets.
Tanzania, Ethiopia and Djibouti each occupy a different position in East Africa’s digital infrastructure landscape. Tanzania offers a substantial, growing domestic market and multiple international connectivity routes. Ethiopia brings scale, a large population and a rapidly developing digital economy. Djibouti plays an unusually important role in international connectivity, with submarine cables linking Africa with Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
There is therefore no single answer to where a business should locate its infrastructure. The more useful question is which location best fits its customers, applications, connectivity requirements and regional ambitions.
East Africa's digital infrastructure requirements are changing
The underlying demand for infrastructure is growing across the region. GSMA reported in 2026 that mobile technologies and services contributed $240 billion to Africa’s economy in 2025, equivalent to 7.8% of the continent’s GDP. It expects that contribution to reach $290 billion by 2030 as 4G, 5G, AI and other digital technologies become more central to businesses and consumers.
That growth matters for data centre strategy because more digital activity means more data to generate, process, store and exchange. Financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, government services and enterprise applications increasingly depend on infrastructure that offers reliable power, connectivity and access to cloud services.
At the same time, the region is far from digitally saturated. DataReportal’s 2026 country reports, which use late-2025 data, estimate internet penetration at 29% in Tanzania, 22% in Ethiopia and 65% in Djibouti.
These gaps show that the three countries are at different stages of digital development, which shapes the role local infrastructure can play.
Tanzania: a market built around regional connectivity
Tanzania is particularly relevant for organisations whose infrastructure needs are closely tied to East and Southern African markets.
The country has a large domestic economy and a significant geographic footprint, with Dar es Salaam acting as an important commercial and connectivity centre. Wingu’s Tanzania facility, for example, connects to SEACOM, EASSy and 2Africa, and sits within an ecosystem of multiple telecommunications and internet service providers. It also has access to the Tanzania Internet Exchange Point through its relationship with TISPA.
For a business, that combination can matter more than the physical location of the data centre. What counts is how easily workloads can connect to customers, branch offices, cloud platforms, networks and other infrastructure.
Tanzania’s wider economy is also expanding. The World Bank’s latest Tanzania Economic Update reports that the economy grew by 5.9% in 2025 and is projected to grow by 6.1% in 2026, continuing to outperform the Sub-Saharan African average, which is projected at 4.3% in 2026.
This makes Tanzania a natural option for companies whose infrastructure strategy centres on serving Tanzanian customers while also reaching neighbouring markets.
Ethiopia: scale and a rapidly expanding digital economy
Ethiopia presents a different proposition. Its sheer market size means that businesses considering East African expansion cannot easily overlook it.
World Bank data puts Ethiopia’s population at more than 135 million, with 2025 GDP growth recorded at 9.8%. For digital infrastructure, what matters more is that the country’s telecommunications and digital economy are changing rapidly.
According to the World Bank, between 2020 and 2024 Ethiopia gained 7 million new unique mobile subscribers, increasing mobile penetration to 33% of the population. Internet access also expanded, with 4 million additional people gaining access over the period. In addition, more than 3,000 digital firms (3,051) had been licensed, creating over 24,000 direct jobs, while mobile-money adoption surpassed 60 million users by early 2025.
The implications for infrastructure are considerable. As more businesses and consumers move to digital services, demand grows for reliable hosting, cloud connectivity, local data processing and secure enterprise infrastructure.
Ethiopia’s geography also makes connectivity to international routes important. Wingu’s Ethiopian facility, for instance, connects into networks reaching cable landing stations in Djibouti, Kenya, Somaliland and Sudan, showing how an Ethiopian data centre can form part of a wider regional connectivity architecture rather than operating in isolation.
For organisations focused on Ethiopia’s large domestic market, local enterprise applications or longer-term growth within the country, the infrastructure decision may therefore be closely tied to Ethiopia’s own digital expansion.
Djibouti: where international connectivity becomes the defining factor
Djibouti has a very different role.
Its population and domestic market are considerably smaller than those of Tanzania or Ethiopia, but its geographic position gives it outsized influence in international telecommunications. That matters more as businesses begin to think of East Africa not as a set of individual countries but as an interconnected digital region.
According to Djibouti Telecom, the country has strengthened its position as a regional connectivity hub, with 10 operational submarine cable systems linking Africa, Asia and Europe. Its existing data-centre capacity is nearing full utilisation, and the World Bank estimates that reforms could unlock US$160 million to US$240 million in private investment in the sector over five years.
This suggests that Djibouti’s role is evolving beyond that of a landing point for international cables. The opportunity increasingly lies in what can be built around that connectivity, including data centres, interconnection, cloud services and regional digital infrastructure.
For companies that prioritise international connectivity, network interconnection or access to multiple markets from a strategically positioned hub, Djibouti can therefore offer something quite distinct from Tanzania or Ethiopia.
The decision is about more than geography
Comparing the three countries on location alone misses the more important infrastructure questions.
A business running latency-sensitive applications will care about where its customers and users are located. An organisation expanding across several countries may value geographic diversity and connectivity between facilities. A financial institution may prioritise resilience, security and regulatory requirements, while a cloud-dependent enterprise may care most about access to multiple networks and cloud environments.
Connectivity is another major consideration. Africa’s digital infrastructure has expanded considerably, but meaningful gaps remain. The ITU estimates that 36% of Africa’s population used the internet in 2025, the lowest regional rate globally. Meanwhile, GSMA estimates that around 906 million people, nearly 60% of Africa’s population, remain within the mobile-internet usage gap despite living in areas covered by mobile broadband. The continent’s key connectivity challenge is therefore increasingly not network coverage, but enabling people who are already covered to use mobile internet.
For businesses, this means the ecosystem around a data centre can matter as much as the facility itself. Multiple network providers, international routes, internet exchanges, cloud connectivity and resilient power all influence the performance and flexibility of an infrastructure strategy.
A regional strategy may make more sense than a single-country decision
For larger organisations, the question may ultimately not be Tanzania versus Ethiopia versus Djibouti.
It may be how the three locations can work together.
A company serving customers across East Africa could, for example, use one location as its primary base and another for disaster recovery, geographic resilience or regional connectivity. Requirements will also vary by sector: a network operator, a fintech company and a cloud service provider will each have different priorities.
This is where the infrastructure ecosystem comes into play. Wingu’s presence across Tanzania, Ethiopia and Djibouti is one example of a regional data-centre strategy built around the distinct characteristics of each market, rather than treating East Africa as a single homogeneous environment. Wingu’s Cloud Exchange follows the same approach, combining cloud services with its carrier-neutral data-centre footprint across the three markets.
Choosing the right location for your business
As this comparison shows, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Djibouti each offer a different combination of market access, connectivity, infrastructure maturity and regional reach.
The right decision starts with understanding where customers are located, where applications need to run, which networks and cloud platforms must be reached, what level of resilience is required and how the business expects its regional footprint to develop over the next several years.
For some organisations, proximity to a large domestic market will be the priority. For others, international connectivity or access to regional networks will carry more weight. Increasingly, a distributed approach, using infrastructure in more than one East African market, may offer the best balance of performance, resilience and growth.
East Africa should not be viewed as three disconnected digital infrastructure markets. Tanzania, Ethiopia and Djibouti play distinct roles within the region’s growing digital ecosystem, and understanding those roles is becoming an essential part of infrastructure planning.
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