MTN Group is targeting 150MW of capacity in a first phase spanning South Africa and Nigeria, group chief executive Ralph Mupita told a media roundtable on Tuesday, and MTN will hold only a minority stake in the venture building it.

The vehicle is Africa Data Hub Holding, a partnership with a UAE-backed data centre investment platform that MTN has still not named.

The strategy is deliberately capital-light. MTN wants partners carrying the skills and the balance sheet to build hyperscale capacity while it stays a minority investor, which fits its Ambition 2030 repositioning and its leverage discipline. Net debt to EBITDA closed the half at 0.3x, no interim dividend was declared, and a R6-billion share buyback is starting.

The demand is enterprise and cloud rather than retail mobile, with MTN expecting Africa's enterprise market to grow around 1.6 times by 2030. On models, Mupita said MTN is not backing a single winner. It wants an open architecture that routes each task to whichever model performs best, explicitly including open-weight models from China alongside frontier ones.

His most interesting AI use case is deliberately unglamorous: using AI to cut network energy consumption, with Cape Town as the test base. Three things stay undisclosed: the partner, MTN's stake and the capital committed.

TechCentral reported the roundtable and Mupita's point that MTN is acquiring land and the necessary power arrangements for multiple phases beyond the first. Its earlier reporting covered the group's plan to turn its African tower estate into an AI inference grid. TechCentral also documented MTN's position that its first AI target is its own operations, before it sells the capability on to anyone else.

Note what Mupita said he is securing: land, and the necessary power arrangements. In South Africa, that second phrase is the entire project. A 150MW load needs a grid connection and a tariff, and the revised electricity pricing policy that went out for comment last week is the document determining what that costs and whether MTN can buy power from anyone other than Eskom.

Unbundled network charges and bilateral generator rules are not abstractions for a business like this. They are the difference between a viable data centre and a stranded site.

Two things worth taking for your own operation. Local AI-ready capacity would ease the rand-against-dollar-pricing problem every local AI builder runs into. And routing between frontier and open-weight models per task is the right architecture at any scale.

You might also like our piece on the revised electricity pricing policy that decides what this power costs, why SA enterprise AI adoption keeps outrunning its own strategy, and how MTN cut 1.5 million prepaid customers in the same set of results.

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