With a career dedicated to the intersection of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, Dominic Jainy has become a leading voice on how technology is reshaping emerging markets. We sat down with him to unpack Orange’s recent €23 million investment in a new Sierra Leone data center. Our conversation explored the intricate technical strategy behind building a high-stakes disaster recovery facility, the deliberate choice of a regional city over the capital, how such an investment translates into tangible local economic growth, and its place within the company’s broader global ambitions for its digital assets.
This new €23 million facility in Bo is a full-scale replica of the Freetown data center. What specific disaster recovery scenarios prompted this significant investment, and can you walk me through the key technical steps involved in ensuring it was an exact operational mirror from day one?
An investment of this magnitude points to a very serious approach to business continuity. The primary scenarios they’re guarding against are events that could cripple or isolate the capital—think severe flooding, a catastrophic failure of the power grid, or even civil disruptions that cut off access to the Freetown facility. The goal is to make digital services as reliable as running water. To create an exact mirror, you’re not just building a shell. It involves replicating the entire technology stack: identical power and cooling systems, the same network architecture, and perfectly matched server and storage hardware. The most critical piece, however, is the data layer. This requires sophisticated, continuous data replication between Freetown and Bo, ensuring that if a failover is triggered, the Bo facility can take over instantly with virtually zero data loss. It’s about creating a living, breathing operational twin, ready to assume control at a moment’s notice.
Choosing Bo City for this critical backup hub is a major strategic decision. Beyond geographic diversity, what specific economic or logistical advantages did Bo offer, and what were the main challenges your team overcame during the construction and commissioning process outside the capital?
Placing the backup hub in Bo is a brilliant move that goes far beyond simple geographic separation. While the primary driver is to avoid a single point of failure by being in a different location, Bo is also a major regional economic center. This decision seeds digital infrastructure right where new growth is happening, creating a secondary technology hub. The challenges, however, would have been immense. You’re operating outside the primary logistics and talent hub of Freetown. Sourcing reliable, high-capacity power and redundant fiber optic connectivity would be the first major hurdle. Then there’s the sheer logistics of transporting highly sensitive and heavy equipment like generators, UPS systems, and server racks inland. It’s a testament to their planning and commitment that they could execute a project of this scale and complexity in a secondary city.
CEO Sekou Amadou Bah stated a goal to “power digital innovation across Bo District and beyond.” Besides providing service continuity, what are some tangible programs or metrics you will use to measure this facility’s impact on local businesses and digital transformation efforts in the region?
That statement is the core of the long-term vision here. The real impact isn’t just in preventing outages; it’s in creating new opportunities. A tangible program would be to offer colocation services directly to businesses within the Bo District—local banks, agricultural tech companies, or regional government offices that previously had no access to secure, reliable data infrastructure. The metrics for success would go beyond the standard uptime percentages. You would measure the number of local enterprises hosted in the facility, track the growth in local digital payment volumes, and see if it attracts new tech-enabled businesses to the region. The ultimate proof of success is when a startup in Bo can launch a digital service with the same confidence and performance as one based in Freetown.
Drawing from your experience operating the Freetown data center since 2018, what specific lessons in terms of power management, security, or connectivity directly influenced the design and operational protocols you implemented in the new Bo facility?
Operating a data center in the region since 2018 provides a wealth of invaluable, hard-earned data. I am certain that power management was a key area of learning. For instance, their experience in Freetown likely gave them a very precise understanding of the local power grid’s unpredictability—not just the frequency of outages, but their duration. This real-world data would have directly influenced the Bo facility’s design. They probably over-engineered the power systems, perhaps doubling the on-site fuel storage capacity and implementing more sophisticated monitoring on their generators and UPS systems. This isn’t something you can learn from a textbook; it’s operational wisdom gained from years on the ground, and it makes the new facility inherently more resilient than its predecessor was on its first day.
What is your forecast for the data center industry in West Africa over the next five years?
The forecast is for incredibly dynamic and, importantly, decentralized growth. For a long time, the focus was on building large, centralized data centers in the biggest commercial capitals. What Orange is doing in Sierra Leone is the blueprint for the next phase. We are going to see a wave of investment in secondary and tertiary cities, building out a more distributed and resilient digital backbone for these nations. This “edge” data center trend will be driven by the need to bring data processing closer to the users for applications like streaming, mobile banking, and IoT. It’s not just about building more data centers; it’s about building them smarter and closer to where they are needed most, which will be transformative for regional economies.