Data-center law in Benin

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-04

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Benin has no data-center-specific land-use, environmental-review, energy-grid, water-utilities, construction, or air-operations statute; a data center would be sited and permitted under the country's general regulatory apparatus rather than a dedicated regime, and none of those five dimensions was independently researched beyond confirming no data-center-specific instrument exists.

The one dimension with a citable instrument is investment incentives: Loi n°2020-02 du 20 mars 2020 portant Code des Investissements en République du Bénin, which repealed the prior 1990 investment code, establishes an ordinary law regime alongside several privileged customs-and-tax regimes and a separate regime for specific investments (régime des investissements spécifiques) that grants total exemption from import duties and taxes, apart from a short list of levies the exemption never reaches, on goods and services strictly needed for a qualifying project during its investment phase.

A company benefiting from a privileged regime must, among other duties, devote a stated share of its payroll to Beninese nationals, meet applicable quality standards, and safeguard environmental conditions, and diverting an imported, duty-exempt good from its declared purpose is a serious breach that can lead to a fine, withdrawal of the regime, and repayment of the value of the advantages received.

The exact investment-size and job-creation thresholds that gate each privileged regime under the current 2020 Code are not established: the official text located online is a scanned publication whose extracted text is materially degraded, so only the structure confirmed by its readable portions is described here, rather than the numeric thresholds carried over from the repealed 1990 Code.

Instruments on record

1 instrument on record, grouped by the family of approval each one governs.

Public agreements

What fiscal agreements attach a data center to its host jurisdiction?

Loi n°2020-02 du 20 mars 2020 portant Code des Investissements en République du Bénin, régimes privilégiés et régime des investissements spécifiques

In force

Loi n°2020-02 du 20 mars 2020 portant Code des Investissements en République du Bénin

Applies to both

Benin's current investment code, adopted by the National Assembly on 29 January 2020 and promulgated on 20 March 2020, repealing the 1990 investment code (Loi n°90-002 as amended) and its implementing texts.

Alongside an ordinary law regime, the Code establishes privileged customs-and-tax regimes for a newly created enterprise that meets an investment threshold and other criteria, and a separate régime des investissements spécifiques (Art. 40) under which an eligible project's imports of goods and services strictly needed for the project are wholly exempt from entry duties and taxes during the investment phase, apart from a short list of levies (road tax, statistical tax, customs stamp duty, and named community levies) the exemption never reaches; a project under this specific-investments regime reverts to the ordinary law regime once it moves into its operating phase.

Diverting an imported, duty-exempt good from the purpose declared in the enterprise's authorization is a serious breach of the enterprise's obligations, punished by a fine set in an implementing decree and, in a case of grave or repeated violation or of failing to carry out the declared investment program, by withdrawal of the regime and a duty to repay the State the value of the advantages received (Art. 41 to 44).

The Code's own extracted text, as located through a reachable official channel, is materially degraded by poor optical-character recognition, so the investment-size and job-creation thresholds gating each privileged regime, and the exact list of privileged-regime categories the current Code uses, are not established here; only the structure described above is confirmed from readable portions of the text.

Loi n° 2020-02 was adopted by the National Assembly on 29 January 2020 and promulgated at Cotonou on 20 March 2020; its text fixes no commencement day, and no Journal officiel issue carrying it has been located.

Source: Full text of law

Every entry cites the instrument it describes. None of it is legal advice: verify a citation before relying on it. Full sourcing: read the methodology. The rest of the record: all jurisdictions.