There’s a boom going on in the datacentre business, which finally seems to have reached the shores of this continent. Datacentres are just one part of a great tide of investment washing over Africa, which has been chronically underserved by almost any kind of infrastructure, digital or otherwise. Its population is also set to double in the next 30 years or so, which means adding the population of France every two years. In this time, there will come to be at least a dozen megacities with populations of over 10 million, including probably the greater Johannesburg area, and with them, an unquenchable thirst for data. The Digital Council Africa reckons there are now 930 million cellphone users in Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2021, but that only 340 million are mobile internet users, which means that just a third have made it online. It’s thought that for the rest of the continent to be on par with South Africa, it will need in the region of 1 000MW of IT load, which will need to be spread between 700 datacentres, according to the African Data Centres Association. There is clearly a very big hole in the continent’s infrastructure fabric that needs to be filled, but there hasn’t been much interest from IT investors, until now. The trickle of data that was drip-feeding the continent will now swell to a roar as two very large sub-sea pipes are lit up. These are Google’s Equiano (150 Tbps) and the Facebook-backed 2Africa (180 Tbps). Equiano is going to be completed sooner than 2Africa, probably in the next couple of months, and Openserve will be its landing partner.

Another major factor has been the explosion of cloud services, and with Amazon and Microsoft both having datacentre regions in South Africa, there’s plenty of scope for growth in countries all the way up Africa. These clouds will need physical datacentre facilities, and it’s here where the founders of Teraco displayed remarkable foresight when they started the company in 2008. It has a sprawling campus in Isando in Johannesburg, which it’s added to over the years, and has two datacentres in Cape Town. It also has one in Bredell, and a smaller one in Durban.