Teraco begins construction of major data centre expansion in South Africa

Teraco has broken ground on a new data centre facility at its Isando Campus in Ekurhuleni, East of Johannesburg.
Dubbed JB5, the data centre will have 30 megawatts (MW) of critical power load and is scheduled to be completed in 2024.
The company, which was recently acquired by Digital Realty for an estimated R32 billion, did not reveal how much it expects JB5 to cost.
However, Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo previously told MyBroadband that such builds cost billions of rand.
Hnizdo could reveal that Teraco’s capital expenditure programme for the next four years would be in the region of R6 billion.
JB5 is Teraco’s eighth data centre development located within Ekurhuleni’s Aerotropolis near South Africa’s biggest airport, OR Tambo International.
It takes Teraco’s critical power load capacity across all its facilities to 156MW.
This includes the Isando Campus facilities; JB1/JB3/JB5 (70MW), Bredell Campus JB2/JB4 (64MW), Cape Town Campus CT1/CT2 (21MW), and Durban (1MW).
JB5 comprises 55,000 square meters of building structure serviced by 120MVA of utility power supply.
It will be built in a single phase and includes twelve 1,000-square meter halls.
“South Africa is a springboard for cloud provision into Africa and, as a result, has become the technology and data centre hub for sub-Saharan Africa,” Hnizdo said in a statement on Monday.
“Massive global investments into undersea cables, like Equiano and 2Africa, further strengthen this position.”