EDIT:Screw the 'groupthink' on HN. Why would you downvote a simple non-offensive comment like this? Africa and its technology are my specific area for research. I know what I am talking about.
Though yes, if Oblio was talking shit about Africa they could use a bit of Three Stooges-esque slapping about.
My phrasing was a bit awkward but my point was exactly what you said.
Every time there's a discussion about major cloud providers (Amazon, Google, etc.) in Africa someone says: "oh, there are DCs in Africa". Then you look them up and they're all in South Africa and the rest of Africa is blank.
There's a reason AfriNIC is better suited to being in Kenya, but is in Mauritius. Even on raw metric terms you wouldn't find Kenya higher on a single metric in terms of cost, or bandwidth. The only one would be latency to Europe and that too due to physical constraints - and even so just on backbone lines.
"non-offensive"
I'm afraid these two things are incompatible with each other.
If there are any, they're super recent.
From what they tell me, some parts of Nigeria have never had electricity, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Hard to believe, but that's the way it is.
It seems to me that staking out the unclaimed position at the furthest southern economic hub makes sense as a first step, whether that hub has the most customers or not.