Biggest data centres in South Africa

South Africa’s biggest data centre has over 33,000m2 of white space and requires 70MW of power to run the IT equipment housed inside.

After Microsoft announced a R5.4 billion investment in data centre infrastructure in South Africa, MyBroadband compared South Africa’s biggest data centres by white space offered.

White space refers to the area of a data centre used to house IT equipment, whereas grey space houses backend equipment such as cooling and power infrastructure.

IT load, also a metric used to compare data centres, refers to the maximum power that can be consumed by IT infrastructure housed in the data centre.

Teraco is the biggest of South Africa’s data centre providers, with five campuses across the country spanning 53,400m2 and offering 223MW of critical IT load.

Other major providers include Africa Data Centres with a total capacity of 64MW, NTT with 15MW, and Open Access Data Centres (OADC) with 23MW.

Teraco boasts the biggest data centre campus of these providers, its Isando campus, which houses its JB1 and JB3 data centres in Kempton Park, Johannesburg.

The Isando campus has a total critical IT load of 70MW and over 32,000m2 of white space.

Teraco also has the country’s second and third biggest data centres: its Bredell and Brackenfell campuses in Johannesburg and Cape Town, respectively.

Its JB4 and JB2 data centres are located on its Bredell campus in Kempton Park, which offers clients over 20,400m2 of white space.

JB4 has a capacity of 50MW and more than 16,000m2 of white space, while JB2 is much smaller, with an IT load of 13MW and 5,400m2 of white space.

Teraco’s CT2 data centre is located in Brackenfell, Cape Town, and has specifications similar to those of JB4. It also houses 50MW of IT capacity but offers over 18,000m2 of white space.

Teraco’s data centres offer network connections to several global cloud service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and Amazon Web Services, through its Africa Cloud Exchange.

Vantage Data Centre’s Johannesburg I is the first phase of the company’s $1-billion investment in South Africa. It currently houses 16MW of IT-critical load across 12,000m2.

Johannesburg I has N+1 power redundancy across all systems, four points-of-entry (POE) ensuring maximum path diversity, and access to both dark and lit fibre.

The company said once the campus in Midrand, Gauteng, is completed, it will span 12 hectares and include 80MW of IT capacity across 60,000m2.

This would make it the largest data centre in the country.

Vantage is also building a second Johannesburg data centre, which will have a capacity of 20MW across 33,000m2.

Africa Data Centre’s JHB1 in Midrand, Gauteng, is the biggest of the company’s data centres, boasting 9,000m2 of white space and an IT load of 14.5MW.

It offers hot and cold aisle containment to maintain cooling efficiencies and N+2 power redundancy.

The company’s JHB2 Samrand data centre in Centurion, Gauteng, has 10MW of IT load and 6,000m2 of white space, offering colocation facilities and connectivity to major hubs and dark fibre infrastructure.

The company has announced plans for a two-phase expansion of the data centre, which will add 14,400m2 of white space and increase its IT load to 35MW.

Like Teraco, both JHB1 and JHB2 offer Multi Cloud interconnection to major service providers, such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.