Teraco to invest R1bn in the expansion of its data centre campus - in its largest infrastructure build project to date, Africa's only neutral data centre provider has announced that it will be expanding the Teraco Isando Campus (JB1). Increased demand for additional data centre capacity is being driven by cloud uptake and enterprise organisations wanting to access the Teraco platform.

The expansion will occur in two phases. Phase 1, currently underway, will grow the facility by 2 000 cabinets bringing the total JB1 Campus capacity to 5 700. Total usable floor space will increase by 4 000 square meters, expanding to a total of 12 000 square meters across the data centre campus. The anticipated ready for service date is in Q3 2019.

A total of 60MW of power will be reticulated to the site addressing requirements for further expansion after Phase 1 has been completed. The total power available to the Isando Campus will now reach 80MW.

Jan Hnizdo, Chief Financial Officer, Teraco says that he sees continued demand for Teraco's services given the unique business model and secular growth trends as the African continent continues to digitally transform. The Teraco Campus expansion follows on from the recently launched Riverfields hyper-scale data centre facility in Bredell.

Hnizdo says that funding for the build is via a combination of internally generated funds and enlarging existing debt facilities from R1.2bn to R1.8bn. "Our debt funding partners, Absa, continue to be highly supportive of our business model and are key partners in Teraco's growth strategy".

Teraco's platform allows direct interconnection

Teraco's offering to clients of resilient data centre facilities allows for a choice of over 300 telco's providing connectivity to Africa and the lowest latency interconnection points to cloud and content. Hnizdo says that with the recent announcements of direct interconnection availability to the major cloud onramps such as Amazon Web Services Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, Teraco has seen a growing uptake driven by the enterprise market.

"The Teraco platform allows enterprises to have direct private connections to all the leading cloud providers in the most latency efficient and resilient manner possible. Enterprises can deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies from the Teraco platform which allows for complete freedom of choice from a cloud provider perspective, as well as significantly reducing the time and cost for enterprises to access these cloud platforms".

Over the past decade, Teraco has focused on growing its ecosystems of telco, content, financial services, enterprise and service providers. Its offering is underpinned by providing clients with direct access to Africa's largest Internet exchange, NAPAfrica, which includes all the benefits of interconnection via the Teraco platform.

Hnizdo says that Teraco is committed to growing its capacity footprint across its core hubs, thereby ensuring that clients have certainty and the flexibility of expansion to take part in the digital transformation that is happening across sub-Saharan Africa: "Teraco continues to invest significantly into the region's ICT infrastructure and has built what is now Africa's largest data centre. We take pride in our vendor-neutral offering, with open access to interconnection and world class resilient data centre infrastructure for all our clients".