TrendAI opens South African data centre, plans Africa expansion - Assad Arabi — Assad Arabi, TrendAI regional MD for Africa, the Mediterranean and the CIS countries

Enterprise cybersecurity firm TrendAI used a customer event in Cape Town on Wednesday evening to announce it has enhanced its data centre facilities in South Africa and is planning further deployments across the African continent.

The announcement was made at a gathering of enterprise and government clients from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Mauritius. It follows the March rebranding of Trend Micro’s enterprise cybersecurity business to TrendAI – a change that applies to the business-to-business arm of parent company Trend Micro, which retains its consumer cybersecurity business under the Trend Micro brand and its automotive cybersecurity subsidiary, VicOne, under its own.

Assad Arabi, TrendAI’s regional MD for Africa and venture markets, told attendees that South Africa is one of only two markets in the Middle East and Africa region where the company has invested to enhance local data centre infrastructure, the other being the UAE. He said the investment was driven directly by clients in financial services and government who were blocked by local regulations from using the company’s platforms when they were hosted offshore.

The South African facility supports hybrid and multi-cloud integration, AI-driven infrastructure monitoring, and disaster recovery. All environments include audit logging and compliance reporting for regulated industries.

TrendAI also disclosed a second-phase investment targeting clients who cannot use cloud infrastructure at all: a product Sovereign Private Cloud. It replicates TrendAI’s cloud platform for on-premises, air-gapped deployment, and is aimed at clients in defence and critical government departments. An air-gapped deployment is a high-security installation method where computer systems are physically isolated from the internet and any unsecured, external networks.

Revenue growth

Bilal Baig, TrendAI’s vice president for Asia, the Middle East and Africa, outlined three enhancements being rolled out locally. The first is a generative AI-powered security information and event management system that the company says can classify unfamiliar log formats in three hours, down from three days previously.

The second is a vulnerability management tool that maps every possible attack path an adversary could take through an environment and predicts the consequences of leaving a vulnerability unpatched.

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The third is an AI security layer covering the full stack of an AI deployment, from data and application layers down to underlying infrastructure.

Arabi said TrendAI recorded 80% year-on-year revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026 across its Africa and Mediterranean region. He said investment in South Africa would double in the current year and again the year after, without disclosing rand numbers.