WIOCC Group, Africa’s largest carrier-neutral digital infrastructure platform, has signed a Shareholder Subscription Agreement with Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) and Vision International Investment Company (Vision Invest), securing a combined $300 million to fund its next phase of growth across the continent.
The two investors signed the deal on September 1 at the LEAP 2026 Global Technology exhibition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, giving WIOCC fresh capital as demand for cloud services, data, and artificial intelligence keeps climbing across African markets.
As per the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), only 35.7% of Africans were online in 2025, against a 73.6% global average, a gap that lines up closely with the infrastructure WIOCC’s $300 million is meant to build, including more data centers, more fiber, and more subsea capacity.
UNCTAD’s forecast that the global AI market will hit $4.8 trillion by 2033 raises the cost of staying on the wrong side of that gap, since the same report warns AI access remains concentrated among a handful of countries and companies. WIOCC’s open-access model, which lets any operator plug in rather than locking capacity behind one provider, bets that closing Africa’s connectivity gap and its AI readiness gap are largely the same task.
WIOCC currently operates in more than 30 African countries and counts telecom operators including Telkom Kenya, Uganda Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, and Zanzibar Telecom’s Zantel among its shareholders, alongside development finance institutions like the International Finance Corporation. The new funding will go toward data center deployment and consolidation, expanding the group’s terrestrial fiber footprint, and new subsea cable investments.
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AFC President and CEO Samaila Zubairu notes that
“The Africa we build must be connected, competitive, and equipped to create value from the digital economy, not only consume it… Fiber, data centers, and subsea cables are now essential infrastructure for growth, innovation, and AI.”
WIOCC Group CEO Chris Wood also states that
“The investment enables WIOCC to execute its long-term growth strategy by accelerating data center deployment and consolidation, expanding the continent’s open-access terrestrial fiber footprint, and investing strategically in new subsea assets.”
Vision Invest also pointed to Africa’s demographics as the underlying case for the bet to invest in Africa as the continent is set to hold more than a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.
For a region where digital infrastructure still lags well behind global norms, the $300 million injection gives one of its biggest builders more room to move, at a moment when AI and cloud demand are reshaping what that infrastructure needs to look like.
