The current Corona crises might be playing havoc with the economy, but some companies are still seeing the value of investing in the future. Data environment provider Teraco today formally confirmed the construction of Teraco Cape Town 2 (CT2), a new 30 MW data centre facility. This follows the company’s recent 60 MW expansion announcement of its Johannesburg data centre campus in Isando, and makes the Cape Town facility the second-largest on the continent.

Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, says that the company is standing by its 2019 commitment to support the South African Government’s investment drive and with this build will be investing billions of rand in South Africa’s digital infrastructure: “We are truly proud that we can keep investing in the region and make good on our promise.”

Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco

Driving this investment, according to Hnizdo, is the growth of cloud in the region, resulting in increased demand from cloud providers, enterprises and sub-sea cable operators seeking to locate their data centre infrastructure at the intersection of the internet: “Proximity to the cloud, ecosystems and the consumer market is vital in new digital architecture as enterprises move their applications into the cloud and transform their businesses.”

Construction on the site commenced in early March 2020 and will continue in line with local COVID-19 restrictions with a targeted completion date of Q3 2021. The completed facility will comprise of eight data halls encompassing 8000 m² of usable floor space, doubling the existing data centre capacity in the Cape Town region.

Hnizdo says that Teraco launched its first data centre facility in Rondebosch Cape Town, CT1, eleven years ago. “This new investment in the Mother City is special for us. To date, CT1 has seen four expansions since launching; the historic building currently has sufficient capacity until the new site is brought to market,” he notes.

Teraco’s offering to enterprises, of resilient data centre facilities, allows for a choice of over 250 networks providing connectivity to Africa and the lowest latency interconnection points to cloud and content.

Hnizdo says that with the recent announcements of direct interconnection availability to the major cloud onramps such as Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect, Teraco has seen a growing uptake driven by the enterprise market. “Platform Teraco allows enterprises to have direct private connections to all the leading cloud providers in the most latency efficient, secure and resilient manner possible. Enterprises can deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies on Platform Teraco, which allows for complete freedom of choice from a cloud provider perspective, as well as significantly reducing the time and cost for enterprises to access these cloud platforms”.

Over the past decade, Teraco has focused on growing its ecosystems of carriers, content, financial services, enterprise and service providers. Its offering is underpinned by providing clients with direct access to Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP), NAPAfrica, which includes all the benefits of interconnection via the Teraco platform. By deploying NAPAfrica within the new CT2 facility, Teraco expects to see further growth and benefit for the enterprise and content ecosystems in the region.

Hnizdo reaffirms that Teraco is committed to growing its capacity footprint across its core hubs, thereby ensuring that clients have certainty and the flexibility of expansion to take part in the digital transformation that is happening across sub-Saharan Africa. “Teraco continues to invest significantly into the region’s ICT infrastructure and has built what is now Africa’s largest data centre platform. We take pride in our vendor-neutral offering, with open access to interconnection and world-class resilient data centre infrastructure for all our clients,” he ends.