The biggest datacentre in Africa being built by Teraco

Reports started in early 2015 regarding the expansion of privately owned data centre infrastructure provider Teraco’s Johannesburg data centre with its expected completion set for early 2017 and latest reports by tech news giant MyBroadband has new news that its completion could be set for end 2016.

The company raised R400m from Barclays Africa in early 2015 with additional funding from a newer investor, Permira, in order for it to increase its capacity at its existing 4,000sqm Johannesburg data centre. With the increase in demand for data centre hosting from service providers and end-users, the infrastructure providers CEO, LEX van Wyk said they “Want to satisfy the current growth”, which we can only expect to increase as cloud services become increasingly popular.

Teraco currently has points of presence in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg and services more than 200 clients including blue-chip companies in various sectors including telecoms, broadcasting and financial services. The Johannesburg data centre expansion is set to increase the facility in Isando, Gauteng to 9000sqm of white space and 18 500sqm of utility space. In addition, to cater for the expansion, Teraco was granted permission by the governing institutions that be to store 210 000 litres of diesel on site which will run the data centre for a minimum period of 40 hours at maximum load in the event of power failure.

The Teraco data centres are an important part of the internet and telecoms industry with all the major providers collocating at the data centre and various core fibre networks terminating there as well.