{"id":619990,"date":"2025-11-26T15:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T13:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=619990"},"modified":"2025-11-26T15:02:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T13:02:03","slug":"the-company-with-enough-data-centre-space-to-cover-10-rugby-fields-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cloud-hosting\/619990-the-company-with-enough-data-centre-space-to-cover-10-rugby-fields-in-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"The company with enough data centre space to cover 10 rugby fields in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

South Africa’s largest data centre company, Teraco, has around 75,400m\u00b2 of whitespace for server deployments, equivalent to the size of roughly 10 rugby fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teraco has become a critical part of the African Internet’s backbone, supporting rapidly growing data traffic across the continent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teraco operates eight data centres across five campuses in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It also has a satellite teleport facility in Johannesburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company was founded by three serial entrepreneurs and telecoms veterans \u2014 Abraham van der Merwe, Joe Botha, and Matthew Tagg \u2014 in 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company is currently under the leadership of Jan Hnizdo, who was initially CEO of the Teraco Data Environments division from 2011. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

This resulted in bandwidth costs plunging<\/a>, enabling local Internet service providers to offer more affordable uncapped broadband products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multiple hyperscale data centres<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Inside the Teraco JB4 data centre. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Teraco’s largest campus is the Isando facility in Johannesburg, which offers 32,000m\u00b2 of whitespace and 70MW of critical IT load.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

JB4’s expansion with 30MW more IT power load across six new 5MW data halls was concluded in August 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

The data centre was recently expanded to offer 18,000m\u00b2 of whitespace and support 50MW critical IT load. That expansion resulted in the recruitment of an extra 30 full-time employees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teraco’s next major upgrade will be a new 40MW hyperscale data centre at Isando called JB6. It also plans to add another 1,000m\u00b2 of whitespace and 2MW of IT load at CT1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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

In addition, Teraco has signed a power purchase agreement with NOA to buy electricity generated from wind power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These steps will see 50% of Teraco’s energy demand met by renewable sources by 2027, expanding to 100% by 2035. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teraco data centre portfolio<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Campus<\/th>Data centres<\/th>Whitespace<\/th>IT load<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Isando, Johannesburg<\/td>JB1
JB3
JB5<\/td>		32,000m\u00b2<\/td>70MW<\/td><\/tr>
Bredell, Johannesburg<\/td>JB2
JB4<\/td>		21,400m\u00b2<\/td>64MW<\/td><\/tr>
Brackenfell, Cape Town<\/td>CT2<\/td>18,000m\u00b2<\/td>50MW<\/td><\/tr>
Rondebosch, Cape Town<\/td>CT1<\/td>2,500m\u00b2<\/td>3MW<\/td><\/tr>
Riverhorse Valley, Durban<\/td>DB1<\/td>1,500m\u00b2<\/td>2MW<\/td><\/tr>
Total<\/strong><\/td><\/td>75,400m\u00b2<\/strong><\/td>189MW<\/strong><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Isando JB1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
JB1 is the facility to the right of the buildings with the green roofs. Towards the back is JB3.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bredell JB2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Isando JB3<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bredell JB4<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Isando JB5<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rondebosch CT1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Brackenfell CT2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Durban DB1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teraco’s facilities can also draw power equivalent to what a coal-fired generating unit at one of Eskom’s older power stations can produce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":606283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[64687,22807,75364,2900,445,1423,441,100906,39683,443],"class_list":["post-619990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-hosting","tag-abraham-van-der-merwe","tag-data-centres","tag-digital-realty-trust","tag-joe-botha","tag-lex-van-wyk","tag-matthew-tagg","tag-teraco","tag-teraco-data-centres","tag-teraco-data-environments","tag-tim-parsonson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619990"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":620100,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619990\/revisions\/620100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}