- Africa Data Centres has expanded its original Cape Town campus, almost doubling its IT load in a new upgrade.
- The upgrade was funded partly by a $300 million investment from an American development corporation.
- The company boasts that the newly upgraded data centre uses sustainable and renewable power and absolutely no water for cooling.
Having broken ground on a second data centre facility in Cape Town in January 2023, Africa Data Centres has announced that its original facility in the city, CPT1, has received an upgrade to bring to par with the second.
The expansion will see three new halls added to the CPT1 campus, and the doubling of capacity of the data centre with a 6MW IT load upgrade. This latest expansion of the facility was also supported by the Ministry of IT of the Western Cape and the Western Cape Department of Economic Development.
“This expansion by Africa Data Centres is in response to the increasing demand for co-location capacity in South Africa. Not only is Cape Town the second largest economy in South Africa, but it is also the de facto software and technology hub in Southern Africa,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, President & Group CEO of Cassava Technologies, parent company of Africa Data Centres.
In an announcement, Africa Data Centres says that the company is seeing “tremendous growth in the data centre market in South Africa generally, as both national and international cloud and IT service providers seek to expand their footprints in the region.”
The African tech industry is ravenous for data, and the data centre business is booming across the continent with South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana as the sub-Saharan hubs. New campuses are springing up every few months from a handful of companies.
An additional 1 000 racks of space available for leasing in the data centre has been added to the Cape Town facility. The expansion sees two more colocation data halls and one hyperscale hall.
“The additional halls are built in the cutting-edge modular design pioneered by Africa Data Centres, which enables rapid scalability and a modern design that allows the facility to be populated as and when required to suit the needs of the customer,” the company says in the announcement.
Adding that the CPT1 facility is now one of the most power efficient and sustainable data centres in South Africa, powered by renewable energy and it claims that the centre uses absolutely no water for its IT infrastructure.
This is a major claim, as data centres infamously use thousands upon thousands of litres of water for cooling. The energy sustainability milestone also comes soon after South Africa adopted a wide-ranging Climate Change Bill.
“The introduction of wheeled solar power at the CPT1 facility offers significant benefits to our’ customers, providing a truly sustainable data centre solution. As the demand for data continues to skyrocket across Africa, a continent where power supply is often intermittent, the need for reliable, cost-effective, and green power has never been more critical,” said Finhai Munzara, Interim CEO of Africa Data Centres.
“Our state-of-the-art facility reduces reliance on non-renewable energy sources, setting a new standard for sustainability in the data centre industry.”
In June, the company announced more expansions to its existing fleet after receiving R2 billion from the Rand Merchant Bank.
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