Africa’s largest interconnection hub and vendor-neutral data center provider, Teraco Data Environments has started the construction on a new hyper-scale data center with 38 MW of critical power load in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. The new facility is known as JB4 and it is expected to be completed in 2022’s first quarter. When fully built, it will be the largest data center in Africa as a stand-alone building.
Biggest in Africa as a stand-alone building
The new facility is the company’s 7th data center development and is located in the heart of the Ekurhuleni Aerotropolis. The location provides access to a wide choice of network service providers, peering at NAPAfrica, regional IXP’s, content delivery networks, and cloud provider on-ramps. JB4 takes critical power load capacity at Teraco facilities to over 110MW. JB4 will be built in two phases set across 6 hectares of land and the first phase includes 8x 1000sqm halls with 19MW of critical power load. Jan Hnizdo, CEO, Teraco, said,
“South Africa is strategically located at the tip of the African continent and as a result, is positioned as a technology and data center hub for sub-Saharan Africa. This is further underpinned by growing undersea and terrestrial fiber connectivity to the rest of Africa. The continued increase of cloud adoption in Africa is also being enabled by investments in critical infrastructure, including hyper-scale data center facilities such as JB4. This will enable global cloud clients to service not only the South African market but reach the rest of the sub-Saharan African region as well.”