Teraco Data Environments (Pty) Ltd, Africa’s largest interconnection hub and vendor-neutral data centre provider has commenced construction on its new hyperscale data centre with 38 megawatts (MW) of critical power load in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
Known as JB4, the facility will be built in two phases set across six hectares of land. Completion is scheduled for early 2022 and as a stand-alone building, it will be the largest data centre in Africa.
Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, says the company is poised for significant growth as hyperscale requirements continue to expand due to 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 data centre 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 data centre 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, 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 data centre 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 located in the heart of the Ekurhuleni Aerotropolis where Teraco’s data centres 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.
JB4 is the latest expansion to Teraco’s growing data centre platform taking critical power load capacity at Teraco’s 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).
Organisations working to accelerate their digital transformation utilise Teraco 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.
