The biggest data center in Africa is nearing completion in South Africa, and will officially be launched at full capacity by November.
Teraco’s Riverfields hyperscale data center facility is one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, and is definitely the biggest on African soil, with a capacity of 24 megawatts and a build cost of $100 million, according to ITWeb.
Located in Bredell, near Kempton Park in Gauteng, the need to invest in and build the hyperscale data center was due to a noticeable uptick in operators, content creators and cloud providers committing to significant infrastructure investment.
This resulted in more demand for data facilities, and Teraco have responded with the Riverfields center to compliment the smaller facility that they completed in the west of Johannesburg earlier this year.
The new data center will meet the demands of technologies that include the internet of things, online content, storage requirements and cloud computing.
“In just under two years, African companies have started to fast-track the adoption of cloud and as a result are aggressively pursuing opportunities to migrate,” the company said in a statement, according to TechFinancials.
“The hyperscale data centre market was estimated at over $1 billion in mid-2015, with significant growth forecast based on storage resource demands in distributed or grid computing environments,” the statement added.
Teraco chief executive officer Lex van Wyk confirmed that the new Riverfields facility is being built due to tremendous demand.
“Hyperscale computing has grown enormously, as has demand for colocation facilities. These trends combined are shaping the way forward for Africa and we anticipate significant uptake as more service providers pinpoint Africa as a growth market,” Van Wyk said, according to ITNewsAfrica.
“The Riverfields facility in Bredell brings our power provision to 50MW, with over 18 000m2 of white space, all of which is required to meet the increasing demand for hyperscale computing,” he added.
The data center will be complete by the start of November, and the company says that the facility is already 25 percent full due to customers pre-booking available space.
Tech giants such as Google and Facebook all rely on hyperscale data centers to handle the massive amounts of data required for their operations, and in building Africa’s largest data center, Teraco is looking to cater locally for startups and other businesses that require their facilities.
