[yardstick]

Some possible reasons I can think of:

- Inconsistent electricity supply (brown outs are somewhat common)

- Poor physical infrastructure (at least a decade ago, copper cable theft was common)

- Business-unfriendly practices - I don't have the exact details, but you often have to run things through a local company with sufficient black representation. Sounds innocent enough, but does create a monopoly you have to deal with. Effectively a tax or bribe depending on perspective.

- Poor connectivity to the rest of the world (slowly getting there with more fibre cables arriving)

- (Edit) Severe water shortages, at least a couple years ago in Cape Town.

I would have thought somewhere North Africa would have been a real contender to make the decision require more thought. E.g. Morocco or Egypt, each with their own pros and cons.

[sgt]

Responses from a local...

> - Inconsistent electricity supply (brown outs are somewhat common)

No serious data center in South Africa is affected by this. All have batteries and diesel generators.

> - Poor physical infrastructure (at least a decade ago, copper cable theft was common)

Luckily copper theft affects DC's and fibre less. With redundancies it is manageable.

> - Business-unfriendly practices - I don't have the exact details, but you often have to run things through a local company with sufficient black representation. Sounds innocent enough, but does create a monopoly you have to deal with. Effectively a tax or bribe depending on perspective.

Yes this is a long term problem with South Africa. It stems from the ruling party (ANC) being super corrupt and embracing victim mentality to shift the blame. But there are often ways around Black Economic Empowerment not involving bribes.

> - Poor connectivity to the rest of the world (slowly getting there with more fibre cables arriving)

There are tons of cables now. We rarely see international outages. Since COVID also a couple of additional redundancies.

> - (Edit) Severe water shortages, at least a couple years ago in Cape Town.

I don't think this affected DC's much. And it's not like we had empty taps. I remember just using sprinklers less and topping up my swimming pool from roof-collected water instead of drinking water. Water shortage is hopefully being addressed long term and reservoirs are mostly full.

[jcranmer]

> No serious data center in South Africa is affected by this. All have batteries and diesel generators.

It does mean higher operational costs since you're going to be paying for the unreliable electrical service in addition to regular usage of on-site electrical generation. So I wouldn't say no one is affected by this, but I will acknowledge the effects aren't measured in visible downtime.

[the-printer]

Is there any sort of tech expat/“digital nomad” sort of community in SA? If so, what’s it like? If not, what inhibits it?

Thanks in advance.

[morog]

Active tech scene particularly around Cape Town, the waterfront & Stellenbosch. Plenty makers, hackers & digital nomads. If you're looking for the outdoor life, MTB & hiking checkout Greyton, 2hrs from Cape Town. Just connected to the fibre network with speeds of 500mbps available. Beautiful mountains, lots of well priced restaurants&pubs. There's a Google engineer, an AWS product manager and plenty designers, coders and nomads in the village. Just won South Africa's Dorp (town) of the year. Ye olde England charm with warm sunny weather and super chilled locals.

[HermanMartinus]

There's a pretty big one in Cape Town. It's beautiful here, the food is good, internet is stable, and the coffee is cheap, so naturally we have hoards of Europeans (mostly Germans) here in the summer.

[belter]

EC2 was created in Cape Town, so I heard....

https://youtu.be/9Gk_I_0eMDA

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> here in the summer.

NB: summer in SA is November -> March, which is a huge win if Northern Europe's dreary winter is getting you down.

But it can be beastly hot in Jan/Feb, if you don't have reliable aircon.

[the-printer]

I’m captured. Thank you.

[saalweachter]

Spitballing, what is internet connectivity like between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa?

If the point of putting a datacenter in Africa is to serve users in Africa better, North Africa may already get pretty good connectivity from European datacenters, so putting the datacenter on the other end may help more overall?

[jhugo]

Yep. I work on latency-sensitive stuff (realtime A/V infra) and our customers have users throughout Africa. North Africa is pretty well connected to Europe, and the Horn of Africa is well connected to the Gulf region and to Mumbai. Southern Africa is the obvious location for a first datacentre, and South Africa is probably the only decent choice in southern Africa.

[jhonof]

Wouldn't Botswana be as good if not better? It has significantly lower corruption issues, and higher GDP per capita and HDI when compared to SA. It also is an incredibly fast growing economy and it has lower crime. Does Botswana just currently not have the talent or infrastructure?

[jhugo]

I think a significant factor, apart from generally worse infra and a smaller talent pool, would be the lack of a coastline. Basically all the long-distance capacity in Africa is in the form of submarine cables going around the coast. A landlocked country means you have to rely on terrestrial systems through at least one third country, introducing a whole range of new costs and risks, and probably makes it hard to get the desired level of control/ownership for the inter-region connectivity (cloud providers are often investing in submarine cable systems directly now).

[MonkeyClub]

> and South Africa is probably the only decent choice in southern Africa.

It’s not racism, it’s just cost-benefit analysis, am I reading it correctly?

[bombcar]

Someone like Google should have very good information on where their current customers (and their customers) are, and that alone could be decisive.

If many of the customers in Africa are already well served by Europe (think Egypt) or the Middle East, and of the remainder a large percentage is in South Africa itself, then South Africa makes a good choice for the first.

After all, starting in SA doesn't prevent them opening further datacenter in other countries as they grow.

[MonkeyClub]

I see downvotes, so I guess people missed the absent /s. Knee jerks much?

But yeah, the question is honest, and would appreciate an answer.

[jhugo]

I didn't downvote, but honestly just don't understand your comment. I thought it was obvious but maybe I shouldn't have left it unsaid: South Africa has significantly better infrastructure than any other country in southern Africa. We're not talking a small difference. If you want to open a cloud region in southern Africa, I don't think you have any other choices.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Spitballing, what is internet connectivity like between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa?

Almost entirely via undersea cables. Cape Town, on the coast at the SW corner of Africa, is actually one of the closest places in Southern Africa to Europe and US, measuring by ping time.

North Africa is already "close enough" to data centres in Europe and/or Middle-east.

[yardstick]

Yeah that’s a good point. Most of the connectivity is via cables running around the coast. So somewhere like Nigeria could also make sense.

[GuB-42]

> I would have thought somewhere North Africa would have been a real contender

Is there really a point in having your first African region in North Africa? North Africa, especially Morocco is pretty close to Europe, where Google already has a big presence. If you want to serve Africa, you might as well start with a location that is further away from where you already are. Another argument going for South Africa.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> I would have thought somewhere North Africa would have been a real contender to make the decision require more thought.

North Africa is "not that far" from existing Data Centres in Europe and Middle-east. It doesn't fill a gap like a data centre at the other end of Africa does.

[2-718-281-828]

and you think the situation is better in Nigeria?

[yardstick]

I think the difference in situations isn’t large enough to make an easy decision.

I’m not saying South Africa is wrong, just saying it shouldn’t be considered the only real option.

[BoardsOfCanada]

I would be amazed if the electricity situation in South Africa is anywhere near as bad as in Nigeria, but I've never been to South Africa so it's just an assumption based on how incredibly bad Nigeria is.

[StevePerkins]

If it weren't sub-Saharan Africa, then would there even be any news or discussion?