TRAILBLAZER

IXEurope was acquired by Equinix in 2007 for US $ 555mn . Prior to founding IXEurope , Wilner worked for CompagnieGenerale des Eaux ( now Vivendi Group ) between 1992 and 1998 , both in the UK and in Hungary , to establish a telecommunications operator culminating in a US $ 210mn EBRD funding .

Willner is also the Chairman of IXAfrica , which , last year , built a 42.5MW , hyperscale-ready data centre in Nairobi . The data centre began its operations this year . Discussing the data centre at the time , he said : “ It ' s a smaller project than IXcellerate ( a leading operator of commercial data centres in Russia ), but a lot of fun because you transpose all the same skills , technology and customer base into a totally different culture .

“ But Kenya is very dynamic with a high speed rail link from Nairobi to Mombasa . There ' s a lot of investment in Africa , which I find exciting , with entrepreneurs building companies , attracting serious finance and yielding good returns . This route to growth is preferable to aid in my opinion . Foreign aid is often a driver of corruption ,” he said .

IXAfrica data centres are designed to accommodate modern high-load servers and infrastructure for ultradense computing in accordance with the latest global standards .

During his time at Teraco , Willner first met his counterpart in the foundation of IXAfrica , Clement Martineau , a relationship which continued throughout the years he spent developing IXcellerate into Russia ’ s leading private data centre operator .

20 June 2022