Africa’s largest data centre to get even larger with big investment
Teraco has announced its largest infrastructure project to date with the expansion of its Teraco Islando Campus (JB1) in South Africa.
According to the company, the expansion is necessary to meet the ever-increasing demand for additional data center capacity that is being fuelled cloud uptake.
The expansion will be carried out in two segments with Phase 1 already underway (expected ready for service date is Q3 2019) to extend the facility by 2,000 cabinets and bring the total JB1 Campus capacity to 5,700.
Total usable floor space will grow by 4,000 square metres to reach 12,000 square metres. All up, 60MW of power will be reticulated to the site and thereby addressing requirements for further expansion after the completion of Phase 1. This will bring the total power available for the campus to 80MW.
Teraco chief financial officer Jan Hnzido says the African continent is continuing to transform its practices to digital so there is no shortage of demans now and in the foreseeable future. The expansion announcement comes after the recently launched Riverfields hyperscale data center in Bredell.
Of course this expansion won't come cheap, and Hnzido says funding comes via a combination of internally generated funds the enlarging of existing debt facilities R1.2 billion to R1.8 billion.
"Our debt funding partners, Absa, continue to be highly supportive of our business model and are key partners in Teraco's growth strategy," says Hnzido.
Hnzido believes the demand for Teraco's services are being partly driven by its recent announcements of direct interconnection availability to the major cloud onramps such as Amazon Web Services Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.
"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," says Hnzido.
"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.
The company has focused its attentions over the past decade to growing its ecosystems of telco, content, financial services, enterprise and service providers.
"Teraco continues to invest significantly into the region's ICT infrastructure and has built, what is now, Africa's largest data center. We take pride in our vendor neutral offering, with open access to interconnection and world class resilient data center infrastructure for all our clients".
