South Africa, Teraco, Africa's largest carrier & cloud neutral colocation data centre and home to NAPAfrica, Africa's largest Internet exchange point (IXP), today announced that it has raised a medium term funding facility from Absa amounting to R1.2 billion.

Teraco's Chief Financial Officer, Jan Hnizdo says that this is another significant milestone for Teraco and that the funding is earmarked for further investments into data centre infrastructure: "We will use the funding to further invest in the Teraco Campus in Isando. The site presently has 20MW's of capacity, which needs to all be brought online. We have also purchased land adjacent to the existing site allowing for further expansion. In addition, a component of the funding has also been earmarked for the construction of Teraco's new data centre in Bredell."

Hnizdo says that the Bredell site has 24MW of power and more than 6000m2 of technical deployment space and will eclipse the existing Teraco Campus from a power availability perspective: "Bredell will be the largest commercial data centre in Africa and Teraco, the largest commercial data centre operator in Africa".

Teraco builds and operates colocation data centre facilities that enable clients to deploy telecommunications equipment and other key IT infrastructure in a scalable way. Teraco further provides clients with a secure environment where they are able to easily connect to submarine cable systems, African terrestrial networks, major African IP backbones and key content.

Teraco's Campus in Isando has been established as the connectivity gateway into South and sub-Saharan Africa. Its client community continues to expand significantly with over 350 key clients deriving significant value from colocating within the connectivity gateway. Teraco is also home to NAPAfrica, Africa's largest neutral layer-two Internet exchange point (IXP) with over 240 unique connected networks and 160Gbps peering traffic across sub-Saharan-Africa.

"Teraco continues to experience high demand for its neutral data centre facilities, underpinned by strong growth in Internet penetration into Africa and increased cloud adoption by the enterprise sector," says Lex van Wyk, CEO of Teraco.

The company has expanded its footprint over the last nine years to include four data centre facilities located in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, which combined, at current facilities end-state will comprise 50MW of power and over 18,000m2 of data centre space.

Hnizdo says the Absa facility will enable the plant and data centre fit-out of the newly completed facility located on the Isando Campus to be completed. It will also partly fund the Bredell facility where construction commenced in November 2016, and is due for completion towards the end of 2017.

"Our partnership with Teraco over the years has played a significant role in their growth and expansion. We believe that Teraco has an important role to play in Africa's ICT sector and this facility will further entrench Teraco as the market leader in vendor neutral data centres in Sub-Saharan Africa," says Jason Abt, Principal at Absa.

"Absa is a trusted business partner and a significant part of Teraco's success. Absa understands our unique business model and the associated infrastructure funding requirements and timelines," says Hnizdo.