Teraco Data Environments (Pty) Ltd.,  Africa’s largest interconnection hub and vendor-neutral data centre provider, today announced that construction has commenced on a new hyperscale data centre with 38 megawatts (MW) of critical power load in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. The facility, known as JB4, is scheduled for completion in Q1 2022 and as a stand-alone building, will be the largest data centre 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 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, 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 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 and is located in the heart of the Ekurhuleni Aerotropolis. It is here that 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 —spurring innovation.

JB4 is the latest expansion to Teraco’s growing data centre 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).

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.

Key Facts

·        JB4 will be the largest single site data centre on the African continent, comprising 50000sqm of building structure serviced by 80MW of utility power supply.

·        Strategically located in Ekurhuleni, East of Johannesburg, alongside the R21 business corridor, the facility will have multiple fibre paths to the Teraco Isando Campus connectivity hub (JB1 and JB3) located some 20 kilometres away.

·        JB4 will be built in two phases set across 6 hectares of land.

·        JB4 – Phase I includes 8x 1000sqm halls with 19MW of critical power load.

·        JB4 – Completed will include 16x 1000sqm halls with 38MW of critical power load.

·        JB4 is a significant addition to South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa’s data centre footprint.

·        The new data centre development is being built in line with global hyperscale requirements as well as international compliance standards and will augment the existing portfolio of ISO9001, ISO27001, PCI-DSS and ISAE3402 certified data centre facilities.