Africa Data Centres has broken ground on the expansion of its facility in Samrand, north of Johannesburg, which will increase capacity from 10MW to 40Nm of IT load.
“The expansion will happen in multiple phases,” says Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres. “The construction of the first phase is starting today and will deliver 20MW across eight data halls by 2023.
“The next phase will include an additional 10MW of IT load by the end of 2025. The infrastructure will be fully modular with all critical plant rooms being prefabricated off-site.”
The company recently said it is expanding its capacity in Johannesburg to 100MW of IT load. This announcement comes hot on the heels of the recent launch of a new 10MW data centre at the company’s campus in Midrand and the expansion of the organisation’s operations in Accra, Ghana.
According to Durvasula: “This is a step forward in the organisation’s massive expansion plans announced in September, the most ambitious data centre expansion plans Africa has ever seen.”
This will see the data centre giant building large hyper-scale data centres across Africa, including Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt.
The breaking of ground for Africa Data Centres’ Johannesburg facilities is an integral part of the expansion, as South Africa is one of the most important data centre markets in Africa and a gateway for smaller neighbouring markets.
“South Africa is a strategic location, being at the southern-most point of Africa and is undoubtedly the de facto data centre and technology hub for the sub-Saharan Africa region,” says Durvasula. “This, in conjunction with the increasing fibre connectivity brought by both undersea and terrestrial fibre networks, makes it at the vanguard of data centre expansion on the continent.”
Once the Samrand facility expansion is completed, Africa Data Centre’s entire platform capacity is expected to exceed 100MW.