DR Congo's $150M Data Center Deal Advances With New Submarine Cable, Interbank Platform

The Democratic Republic of Congo's push to build out AI-ready digital infrastructure advanced in early 2026, with details emerging on a $150 million Tier 3 data center deal signed in October 2025 with United Investment LMT, alongside plans for a new submarine cable connection and a national interbank payments platform set to launch in March 2026.

The data center agreement, part of the broader $8.7 billion National Digital Plan unveiled by the government the same month, is designed to give the DRC the kind of high-availability computing infrastructure needed to support AI workloads, cloud services, and data localization requirements that officials have flagged as prerequisites for the country's AI ambitions. Tier 3 certification, an industry standard denoting data centers with redundant power and cooling systems capable of near-continuous uptime, would place the DRC's new facility well above the infrastructure typically available in the country to date.

The planned submarine cable is intended to address one of the DRC's most persistent digital bottlenecks: reliance on a limited number of international connectivity routes that leave the country vulnerable to outages and high bandwidth costs. Improved international connectivity is widely viewed by regional telecom analysts as a precondition for meaningful AI infrastructure investment, since AI workloads are especially sensitive to latency and bandwidth costs.

Separately, a national interbank payments platform is scheduled to launch in March 2026, aiming to connect banks and mobile money providers into a single interoperable system — a development with direct relevance to the DRC's fast-growing fintech sector, which includes platforms like MaishaPay and VaultPay serving a largely underbanked population.

Together, the data center, cable, and payments platform represent concrete infrastructure follow-through on commitments made when the DRC unveiled its National AI Strategy and Digital Plan in October 2025, giving the country's AI ambitions a physical and financial foundation still under construction.