More than a year ago Microsoft announced that it would deliver two new data centres based in South Africa, South Africa North in Johannesburg and South Africa West in Cape Town.

Now, 18 months later, Microsoft South Africa’s Director of Commercial Partners, Lionel Moyal, has announced that the two Azure datacenter regions are due to go live “within weeks” at the end of 2018.

Calling the centres “a cloud for Africa”, he noted that “latency will not be an issue any more.”

The announcement follows Amazon saying in October 2018 that AWS was to open Data Centers in South Africa by 2020.

Lionel was speaking to entrepreneurs and startups at the Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018 in South Africa, where he encouraged workers to skill up in cloud technologies, machine learning, AI, mobile technologies, development tools, noting that he expected South Africa to add 112,000 IT specific jobs by 2022.

Via MicrocareGH