Teraco announces construction of ‘largest single site datacentre in Africa’
Africa’s largest interconnection hub and vendor-neutral datacentre provider Teraco Data Environments has announced that construction has commenced on a new hyperscale datacentre with 38 megawatts (MW) of critical power load in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, South Africa.
According to Teraco, the facility, known as JB4, is scheduled for completion in Q1 2022 and, as a stand-alone building, will be the largest datacentre in Africa.
CEO of Teraco, Jan Hnizdo, said that the company is poised for significant growth as hyperscale requirements continue to expand as a result of increased demand for cloud services in Africa.
“South Africa is strategically located at the tip of the African continent and as a result, is positioned as a technology and datacentre hub for Sub-Saharan Africa. This is further underpinned by growing undersea and terrestrial fibre connectivity to the rest of Africa. The continued increase of cloud adoption in Africa is also being enabled by investments in critical infrastructure, including hyperscale datacentre facilities such as JB4. This will enable global cloud clients to service not only the South African market but reach the rest of the sub-Saharan African region as well.”
Hnizdo reaffirms that Teraco is committed to growing its capacity footprint across its core hubs, thereby ensuring that clients have the certainty and flexibility of expansion to take part in the digital transformation that is taking place across Sub-Saharan Africa: “Teraco continues to invest significantly into the region’s ICT infrastructure and has built what is now Africa’s largest datacentre platform. We take pride in our vendor-neutral offering, enabling open access to interconnection and world-class resilient data centre infrastructure for all our clients”.
The JB4 facility is Teraco’s seventh data centre development and is located in the heart of the Ekurhuleni Aerotropolis. It is here that Teraco’s datacentres already provide access to a wide choice of network service providers, peering at NAPAfrica, regional IXP’s, content delivery networks and cloud provider on-ramps.
Hnizdo says that this expansion is aimed at further supporting Sub-Saharan enterprises with advancing their digital transformation strategies, as well as enabling global cloud providers to expand their footprints —spurring innovation.
JB4 is the latest expansion to the company’s growing datacentre platform and takes critical power load capacity at Teraco facilities to over 110MW, which includes the Isando Campus JB1/JB3 (39MW), Bredell JB2 (13MW), Rondebosch Cape Town CT1 (3MW), Brackenfell Cape Town CT2 (18MW) and Durban (1MW).
Teraco says organisations working to accelerate their digital transformation utilise the company "to dynamically scale their IT infrastructure, adopt hybrid multi-cloud architectures and interconnect with strategic business partners" within the Platform Teraco ecosystem of over 600 global and local clients.
Increasing cloud investment
Organisations across sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly leveraging multiple cloud deployments to achieve digital transformation.
The shift is one of the key findings in World Wide Worx’s Cloud in Africa 2020 report, which surveyed technology decision-makers in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and Malawi.
According to the study, 33% of organisations currently have multiple cloud providers (between two to ten). 69% of respondents also claim to have multiple enterprise agreements with cloud providers.
"With major datacentres having been rolled out in South Africa over the past 18 months, and more to come, the region as a whole will become a hotspot of cloud growth,” says Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx and lead analyst on the project. “Encouragingly, while South Africa will clearly be the springboard for that growth, we can also see massive demand looming across sub-Saharan Africa.”