The Inga site on the Congo River currently produces less than 2 gigawatts of its potential 44 gigawatts, and the government sees data centers as ideal partners to help unlock that capacity, according to Bob Mabiala Mvumbi, head of Congo’s Inga development agency.
With nearly twice the power potential of China’s Three Gorges Dam, abundant water for cooling, and nearby fiber connections, “you would not have a better place than Inga” for a data center, Mabiala said Wednesday at a US-Congo investment forum in Washington.
While most data centers today have capacities measured in the hundreds of megawatts, several AI and technology giants – including OpenAI and Oracle Corp. – are pursuing projects capable of handling multiple gigawatts, or enough electricity to power nearly 900,000 homes per year, according to Carbon Collective. That scale of capacity is seen as critical to achieving artificial superintelligence.
Interest in developing data centers across Africa is also accelerating, with companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon Web Services Inc. making multiple investments in East Africa and South Africa, said Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking Chief Executive Officer Luvuyo Masinda in an interview on Wednesday.
Data centers make business sense in Africa, “if you can have a consistent supply of power – because, relatively speaking, you’re still able to provide it at a cheaper entry point than in developed markets, he said. “Some of these are $3 billion to $4 billion projects. Not all of them might come to light, but that’s the sort of size.”
Congo built two dams at Inga more than 40 years ago, but has struggled to expand the site, with high costs and logistical hurdles stalling construction of the Grand Inga project, which envisions a total of eight dams.
Momentum for the next phase, Inga III, is now building as Congo’s world-class copper mining industry faces an acute power shortage.
The World Bank has committed $1 billion to advance the development of the site. The first $250 million installment is expected to be disbursed this year, the lender’s representative, Albert Zeufack, told the forum.
The Washington-based lender will also try to de-risk the project to attract private sector investment, including through its Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, Zeufack said.
Mabiala told Bloomberg he couldn’t be sure of the total cost of the public-private partnership to develop the next phase, but estimated it at about $2 million per installed megawatt, including transmission. That puts the total price of the 11-gigawatt Inga III project at more than $20 billion.
The government is drafting a special ‘Inga Law’ to create a regulatory and fiscal framework to attract private investment and plans to engage companies capable of handling the project’s design and construction phases, he said.
