The company with enough data centre space to cover 10 rugby fields in South Africa

South Africa’s largest data centre company, Teraco, has around 75,400m² of whitespace for server deployments, equivalent to the size of roughly 10 rugby fields.

Teraco has become a critical part of the African Internet’s backbone, supporting rapidly growing data traffic across the continent.

Teraco operates eight data centres across five campuses in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It also has a satellite teleport facility in Johannesburg.

The company was founded by three serial entrepreneurs and telecoms veterans — Abraham van der Merwe, Joe Botha, and Matthew Tagg — in 2007.

The trio identified a gap in the market for a vendor-neutral co-location data centre. An experienced management team led by Tim Parsonson and Lex van Wyk took over in 2008.

Parsonson was the company’s first group CEO until 2013. Van Wyk initially served as co-CFO and took over from Parsonson between 2013 and 2019.

The company is currently under the leadership of Jan Hnizdo, who was initially CEO of the Teraco Data Environments division from 2011.

Teraco was acquired by San Francisco-based real estate investment trust Digital Realty for $3.5 billion in 2022, converting to around R56 billion at the time.

Among its key contributions to improving Internet access in South Africa was establishing NAPAfrica, the continent’s first Internet exchange point in a vendor-neutral data centre.

With free peering, it encouraged major online services like Cloudflare, Google, Facebook, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Netflix to host their platforms and content locally.

This resulted in bandwidth costs plunging, enabling local Internet service providers to offer more affordable uncapped broadband products.

In addition to reduced connectivity costs, end-users can get content faster, and peering platforms can remain accessible or partially accessible in cases where submarine cables experience downtime.

NAPAfrica recently celebrated reaching traffic throughput of six terabits per second (6Tbps), a six-fold increase in five years. For comparison, it took eight years to reach 1Tbps of traffic.

Multiple hyperscale data centres

Teraco’s largest campus is the Isando facility in Johannesburg, which offers 32,000m² of whitespace and 70MW of critical IT load.

However, the single data centres with the highest IT load capacities are CT2 in Brackenfell, Cape Town, and JB4 in Bredell, Ekurhuleni, each with 50MW of critical IT power load.

JB4’s expansion with 30MW more IT power load across six new 5MW data halls was concluded in August 2025.

CT2’s newest 32MW of capacity was delivered in November 2025 and is spread across eight new data halls on three levels.

The data centre was recently expanded to offer 18,000m² of whitespace and support 50MW critical IT load. That expansion resulted in the recruitment of an extra 30 full-time employees.

Teraco’s next major upgrade will be a new 40MW hyperscale data centre at Isando called JB6. It also plans to add another 1,000m² of whitespace and 2MW of IT load at CT1.

To support Teraco’s substantial power demands while reducing its carbon footprint, the company plans to significantly increase the share of renewable energy sources in its electricity supply.

The company already has 6MW of rooftop solar power at its data centres, which it will expand to 10MW by the end of 2026.

It will also start using power from a 120MW solar power plant in the Free State, which is set to become operational next year.

In addition, Teraco has signed a power purchase agreement with NOA to buy electricity generated from wind power.

These steps will see 50% of Teraco’s energy demand met by renewable sources by 2027, expanding to 100% by 2035.

Teraco data centre portfolio

Isando JB1

Bredell JB2

Isando JB3

Bredell JB4

Isando JB5

Rondebosch CT1

Brackenfell CT2

Durban DB1

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