Helios Investment Partners and Fipar-Holding, a subsidiary of CDG Invest, have partnered this month to create 3MDC, a new digital infrastructure platform designed to accelerate Morocco’s digital transformation and reinforce the country’s role as a regional technology hub serving North Africa and Southern Europe. 🚀🇲🇦🌐
About Helios and CDG Invest 🌍🏦🤝
Helios Investment Partners is a leading Africa-focused private equity firm founded in 2004, with a strong track record in digital infrastructure, telecoms, financial services and energy across the continent. CDG Invest, through its subsidiary Fipar-Holding, is the investment arm of Morocco’s Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion (CDG) Group, a cornerstone institutional investor supporting the country’s long-term economic and infrastructure development.
A Consolidated Hybrid-Cloud Champion ☁️🔐🏗️
3MDC brings together three established Moroccan technology players:
- Maroc Datacenter (MDC) – a fast-growing, carrier-neutral Tier III data centre platform (Tier III refers to a data centre design standard offering high availability, with redundant power and cooling systems and an expected uptime of 99.98%, compared with Tier I and Tier II facilities which have limited or no redundancy and require planned shutdowns for maintenance)
- Munisys – a leading provider of cloud, cybersecurity, systems integration, and managed services
- Medasys – a technology integrator with deep expertise across Morocco’s public and private sectors
The integration creates a fully integrated hybrid-cloud platform offering sovereign, secure, and scalable digital solutions tailored to enterprise and public-sector clients. 🌐⚙️🛡️
Ownership Structure and Strategic Alignment 🤝📈🇲🇦
Under the transaction structure:
- Helios IV Fund will hold 44% of 3MDC
- Fipar-Holding will own 40%
- Founders and management teams will retain 16%
This balanced ownership model aligns international private capital, national institutional investors, and local operators, ensuring long-term commitment, strong governance, and operational continuity. Helios previously acquired a majority stake in Maroc Datacenter in November 2022, laying the foundation for the platform’s creation. 🏗️📊🌍
Strategic Rationale: Digital Sovereignty and Regional Scale 🛡️🌍📡
Morocco’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, driven by cloud adoption, cybersecurity requirements, and increasing demand for in-country data hosting. 3MDC is positioned to address:
- Digital sovereignty requirements for sensitive data
- Growing enterprise demand for hybrid-cloud architectures
- Public-sector digitalisation initiatives
- Cross-border connectivity between Africa and Europe
Through partnerships with global technology providers, the platform will deliver secure, compliant, and future-ready infrastructure while retaining strong local anchoring. 🌱🔗💡
Financial Modelling Perspective: Platform Economics in Digital Infrastructure 📊🧮💻
From a financial modelling standpoint, 3MDC represents a classic buy-and-build platform strategy in digital infrastructure:
- Recurring, contracted revenues from colocation, cloud, and managed services
- High operating leverage once utilisation scales
- Capex-heavy early years followed by strong free cash flow generation
- Synergies from shared infrastructure, cross-selling, and unified go-to-market
For infrastructure and private equity investors, hybrid-cloud platforms offer attractive long-term IRRs, inflation-linked pricing dynamics, and defensive characteristics relative to traditional infrastructure assets. 📈⚙️📉
For practitioners looking to model these assets in detail, dedicated data centre financial models—covering utilisation ramp-up, power costs, capex phasing and long-term cash flows—are increasingly used in investment analysis, such as this Data Centre Financial Model on Eloquens: https://www.eloquens.com/tool/5avLcZMN/finance/industry-specific-financial-models/data-center-development-10-year-financial-model?ref=finteam
Conclusion: Building Morocco’s Next-Generation Digital Backbone 🚀💻🌍
The launch of 3MDC marks a significant step in consolidating Morocco’s digital infrastructure landscape. By combining data centres, cloud, cybersecurity, and systems integration under a single platform, Helios and Fipar are positioning 3MDC as a national digital champion—capable of supporting Morocco’s digital sovereignty ambitions while serving regional demand across Southern Europe and Africa. 🌐⚡📈
Finteam 