Africa Data Centres to Build Second Data Centre in Cape Town

Image of three men holding shovels at the groundbreaking of the new Africa Data Centres location in Cape Town

Africa Data Centres, a subsidiary of Cassava Technologies, a pan-African technology group, announced today that it is building a second data centre in Cape Town, South Africa. The new facility, located in the northern part of the city, will have an IT load of 20MW and is set to be operational by mid-2024.

According to Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres, the company is building this second facility to meet the growing demand for data centre services in the region and beyond. Cape Town is a thriving city and the second largest economy in South Africa, and it is regarded as the country’s IT and software hub. The company already operates the first hyperscale colocation data centre in the city, which already houses a number of global providers alongside major South African enterprises and government. This second facility will add capacity to the region and provide redundancy for customers.

The construction of Africa Data Centres’ second data centre in Cape Town is part of the group’s ongoing and substantial investment in infrastructure in the Western Cape province and reflects its confidence in the economy of the province and of South Africa, the continent’s largest IT infrastructure and services market. The build is also part of Africa Data Centres’ wide-scale African expansion drive, which will see the company building several new facilities across the continent.

The new data centre will be 12,000 square meters of white space, and the company is targeting Cape Town as a prime location for data centres due to its proximity to submarine cable landing stations and its ability to provide geographic redundancy from the company’s other facility in the south of the city. This enables customers to put down multiple sites for redundancy or simply gives them an additional option in the market.

The new build will have the same world-class security standards as the company’s other facilities and will focus on elements that matter most to clients, such as scalability, flexibility, and energy efficiency. The facility will be built to Africa Data Centres’ new standard modular design, which will be deployed across Africa in multiple markets and is already in Johannesburg at the company’s flagship Midrand facility. This modular design pioneered by Africa Data Centres is leading-edge and ensures rapid scalability and a standardised design that enables the data centre to be populated as and when required.

In terms of size, the data centre will be 12,000 square meters of white space, or the space available for customers to lease, although the physical site will be much larger than that. “Similarly, although many competitors speak of the load in actual power, we prefer to think about this number from a customer’s perspective and always work on IT load,” added Durvasula.

“This second data centre facility in Cape Town increases the number of our data centres in South Africa to four and is part of our investment program to deliver an additional ten data centres in Africa. I would like to acknowledge the Western Cape Provincial Government and the Western Cape Department of Economic Development who have been extremely supportive as we expand our data centre facilities in Cape Town,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, Group President & CEO of Cassava Technologies.

The new data centre will provide a range of services including colocation, cloud computing, and managed services to a diverse range of customers, from large enterprises to start-ups, and will help to drive economic growth and innovation in the region.

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