Industrial & Tech · Data Centre
Mission-critical infrastructure designed to the most exacting international standards
The Safaricom Wakanda Data Center is one of the most technically demanding projects in HGC's portfolio — and one of the most significant pieces of digital infrastructure built in Ethiopia to date. Designed in collaboration with Huawei and developed for Safaricom Ethiopia's national network operations, the facility is located at the ICT Park in Addis Ababa and was built to Tier III data centre standards, meaning redundant systems throughout and a guaranteed uptime of 99.982%.
Data centres are a fundamentally different design challenge from any other building type. There are no windows, no public-facing spaces, and no aesthetic brief in the conventional sense. Everything is subordinate to one requirement: the facility must never go down. That constraint drives every architectural and engineering decision — from structural grid to roof drainage to the placement of access routes for maintenance personnel.
HGC's design prioritised the operational logic of the facility from the very first layout. The server halls are arranged on a hot aisle / cold aisle principle, with raised floor systems allowing cold air to be delivered precisely to equipment inlets and hot exhaust to be captured and returned to the cooling units. The structural grid was coordinated with the raised floor module to eliminate dead zones and allow maximum flexibility for future equipment reconfiguration.
Tier III certification requires that every critical system — power, cooling, networking — has at least one independent backup capable of sustaining full facility operation. HGC's MEP team designed a dual-path power distribution system fed by two separate utility supply points, backed by a bank of uninterruptible power supplies and multiple diesel generators with an on-site fuel reserve sufficient for 72 hours of autonomous operation. The cooling system uses N+1 redundant precision air conditioning units with automatic failover.
Security was designed in layers: a vehicle exclusion perimeter, man-trap airlock entry system, biometric access control at every server hall, and a full CCTV and monitoring infrastructure integrated with the building management system. The building envelope was designed to resist forced entry while maintaining the thermal performance required by the precision cooling systems inside.
Beyond its technical specifications, this project holds broader significance. A Tier III certified data centre of this scale, built to international standards in Addis Ababa, represents a critical step in Ethiopia's digital transformation — supporting the reliable connectivity that businesses, institutions, and citizens depend on. HGC is proud to have contributed architectural and engineering expertise to a facility that will serve the country for decades to come.