• According to a new ranking, Johannesburg is the 27th largest data centre market in the world, beating Melbourne, Madrid, Berlin and other major cities.
• The city’s data centres consume the most power of all the data centre hubs in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Hyperscalers like Teraco and Africa Data Centres maintain campuses in the city.

New data from the Visual Capitalist has ranked the top 50 data centre markets in the world in terms of the power they consume. This amount of power is directly proportional to the number of data centres in a particular market, and the data that they produce. Today there are an estimated 8 000 data centres in the world.

The data from the rankings was sourced from news articles, Data Centre Hawk and Cushman and Wakefield.

According to the rankings, the Johannesburg, South Africa market is the 27th largest worldwide with a capacity of 161MW of power. The Johannesburg market is the largest and most power-hungry data centre market in all of the Southern Hemisphere, even larger than Melbourne, Australia which has a capacity of 149MW.

Johannesburg’s data centres consume more power and produce more data than those in Montreal, Madrid, Delhi, Boston, Berlin, Warsaw, Oslo and Stockholm. It is the largest and most notable data centre market in Africa.

The largest market in the world is in Northern Virginia, in the United States. The state has nearly 300 data centres (many of them AWS servers) and has a combined capacity of 2 552MW of power. This region is estimated to handle more than one-third of global online traffic.

Second-largest is Beijing with a measured capacity of 1 799MW. It is the only market with an operational capacity of over 1 000MW in the Asia Pacific region, even beating out Tokyo (865MW). Meanwhile, Europe’s biggest data centre clusters are in London and Frankfurt respectively.

Most data centres are clustered together in capital cities and major metropolitan areas to take advantage of infrastructure best and due to demand from local enterprises who would be looking to leverage the facilities.

In Johannesburg, companies like Teraco and Africa Data Centres have major facilities. In particular, Africa Data Centres has campuses in Midrand and Samrand. The company has 10 hyperscale campuses across Africa in countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt.

Meanwhile, Teraco maintains two campuses in Johannesburg, including the Isando Campus (70MW) and Bredell Campus (64MW).

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]