(The Southern African Times) – Vendor-neutral data center and interconnection services provider Teraco Data Environments, has completed the multibillion-rand first phase of Cape Town 2 (CT2), its new hyperscale data center in Brackenfell, Cape Town, the largest data center in the Western Cape.
The data center is positioned for cloud providers and enterprises in telecoms, financial services, e-commerce, logistics, and retail.
The completion of CT2 phase one follows the August 2021 announcement that Teraco had completed construction of its JB3 data center facility, located within the Isando Campus in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
Phase one includes 18MW of critical power load across 8,000sqm of data hall space, plus 25,000sqm of building structure.
Although a price for the project has not been disclosed, Teraco said it was a “multi-billion-rand data center facility” that “dramatically extends” Platform Teraco in the Western Cape.
CEO Jan Hnizdo said: “Forming a vital part of the African IT landscape, Platform Teraco is an essential part of the modern enterprise’s digital transformation strategy with its diverse industry ecosystems and open interconnection marketplace.”
CT2 is connected to all the other Teraco data centers through the diverse ecosystem of network operators in the facility, making it ideal for the distributed interconnection-defined architecture of the modern enterprise.
Teraco has secured adjacent land and power for future expansions that could bring the total critical power load to 36MW.
As part of Teraco’s broader campus, CT2 – alongside the CT1 facility – provides enterprises with direct access to Platform Teraco, comprising more than 250 network providers, global cloud on-ramps, subsea cable systems, access to over 50 managed service providers, and direct peering at NAPAfrica, Africa’s largest Internet exchange point.
Clients deployed in either of these facilities can connect to AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute directly or via Teraco’s Africa Cloud Exchange.
Hnizdo added that: “Enterprises are looking for the ability to scale as network strategies evolve, and in a world where fast and secure interconnection with strategic business partners is a priority, this is a source of competitive advantage.”
“Over the last few years, we have taken our ever-expanding ecosystems and network-dense interconnection hubs and moved beyond simple colocation. Teraco is the enterprise infrastructure platform for growth and innovation,” he concluded.
On other projects, Teraco’s JB4 is due for completion in Q1 of 2022.
That facility will take critical power load capacity across the portfolio to more than 110MW, which includes the Isando Campus JB1/JB3 (39MW), Bredell JB2 (13MW), Rondebosch Cape Town CT1 (3MW), Durban (1MW) and, of course, CT2 in Brackenfell (18MW).
The firm completed the expansion of JB3 in August 2021 and connected its eighth submarine cable to the network in June 2021.
On finance, in 2017 Teraco received US$90 million from Barclays Africa Group to build out its infrastructure and in February of 2021 finalized a US$166.6 million loan financing transaction.
