MainOne

MainOne is a Lagos-based West African connectivity and datacenter operator founded in 2008 by Nigerian engineer Funke Opeke. It launched what was then the region's first privately owned open-access submarine cable, a roughly 7,000 km fiber system stretching from Portugal to Nigeria (with branches to Ghana, Senegal, and Cote d'Ivoire) that went live in July 2010 and broke SAT-3's pricing monopoly on international bandwidth into West Africa.

Its datacenter arm, MDXi, opened what MainOne called Nigeria's largest Tier III facility in Lekki (Lagos) in 2015 and expanded with additional sites in Sagamu (Ogun State), Appolonia (Ghana), and Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire). MDXi's Lagos campus has hosted content-delivery nodes for Google, Facebook, and Akamai, and served as the anchor point for major cloud on-ramps into the region.

In December 2022 Equinix completed a roughly $320 million acquisition of MainOne, folding the company into its Africa business and rebranding the datacenters under the Equinix "LG", "AC", and "AB" IBX naming. The deal was Equinix's first entry into West Africa and gave it a subsea cable asset plus four operating datacenters across three countries. Funke Opeke remained a senior figure through the transition; day-to-day West Africa operations are now run inside Equinix's EMEA segment.