Teraco’s new data centre is an engineering marvel

Situated along the R24 highway in Ekurhuleni, Teraco’s JB5 data centre is hard to miss. The impressive feat of engineering is expected to be fully operational in the next two months.

MyBroadband recently toured the facility with Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo. He described the building as almost breathing, with pockets of cool and hot air from its cooling systems felt frequently while exploring the building.

The amount of materials that went into the facility’s construction is arguably more impressive.

Due to the significant weight of cooling systems, water tanks, and client equipment, data centres must be built to support all of these aspects.

In the case of Teraco’s 30MW JB5 data centre, no less than 3.8 million bricks, 802 tonnes of structural steel, 5,427 tonnes of reinforcement steel, and 28,929 cubic metres of concrete were used for its construction.

We also stepped into a data hall during the commissioning phase, where Teraco uses resistive load banks to ensure the hall can handle power and cooling demands.

“They offer resistance (load) by way of heating elements and fans. The result is electrical load placed on the Teraco Energy Centres and heated air, which creates a thermal load on the cooling system,” it said.

“Two Teraco Energy Modules were recently commissioned along with their four corresponding data halls. The total load achieved between the two modules was 10MW.”

The JB5 facility is a 30MW data centre that will house Teraco’s first artificial intelligence (AI) workloads at scale.

While the facility is only expected to be fully operational in the next two months, half of it already has IT workloads running in it, and it has secured clients to fill the rest of the space.

Regarding cooling, JB5 uses a closed-loop water-cooling system to keep client racks, including power-hungry and heat-producing hyperscaler graphics cards, at optimal temperatures.

Moreover, adopting a closed-loop system means the facility does not need to worry about municipal water interruptions. The facility also makes good use of outside air for natural cooling.

Data centres evolving in South Africa

Hnizdo recently told MyBroadband that the data centre industry is evolving as operators prioritise sustainability, reducing environmental impact, and meeting AI demands.

While doing so, they must still manage costs, efficiency, and resilience, ensure connectivity and network performance, and evolve their cooling technologies.

“The data centre industry is ramping up the adoption and development of sustainable practices to limit the industry’s impact on the environment,” he said.

“This drive is encouraged by pressure from market regulators, investors, and clients. It is conducive to continuous innovation, epitomised by liquid cooling and using renewable energy to power data centres.”

Hnizdo said Teraco is dedicated to responsibly and sustainably powering, connecting, protecting, and growing African enterprises and ecosystems.

“Our ambitions align with the seven United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) that are the most important to our strategy,” he added.

The data centre operator has invested heavily in renewable energy sources, and it will continue to drive its renewable energy goals through:

• Maximising rooftop solar coverage across all existing and newly built facilities.
• Investing and engaging utility-scale wheeled energy solutions from renewable energy sources.
• Evaluating and implementing alternative green energy offset mechanisms for our and our clients’ energy consumption.

“We have committed to powering our data centre colocation facilities with 50% renewable energy by 2027 and 100% by 2035,” said Hnizdo.

“We have also maximised our combined rooftop solar footprint across all our facilities, which equated to roughly 80,000MWh in energy savings by the end of 2023.”

Below are images of Teraco’s JB5 data centre.