[rsync]

"Would it seriously have gone to anywhere else?"

Absolutely - Egypt.

Much larger population, more deeply entrenched data (phone) usage, and cable landings that are close, in hops, to European cable landings like Marseille.

During a lunch conversation years ago with init7 (European IP transit) engineers we discussed a fictional CDN and I, naively, threw out Dubai as a potential regional hub and they scoffed. Egypt is where the peering is.

[Symbiote]

Egypt has good connections to Europe and the Middle East, so there's no need for a new region there. Host in Madrid, Milan or Tel Aviv instead.

South Africa is filling a gap.

[bretpiatt]

Egypt is also larger in GDP than South Africa, 2nd on the continent behind Nigeria[1].

The interesting piece in decision process from my view is can North African customers support their operations with European regions due to the better peering/additional cabling while further south they really need something local in order to drive cloud adoption?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_G...

[dehrmann]

Absolutely not. It's not politically stable enough and is too close to Europe, so there isn't a big enough ping time benefit.

[polski-g]

Egypt generally bans encryption, so that would not work for GC.

[armatav]

Way higher up in Africa than SA?