South Africa’s largest data centre operator, Teraco, has completed its latest build project, JB4, a 50MW AI-ready facility at its Bredell campus east of Johannesburg.
The 30MW addition expands JB4 to being the largest standalone data centre built in Africa, servicing 50MW of critical IT power load, Teraco said in a statement on Monday.
“This new phase at JB4 comprises six data halls, incorporates numerous new design enhancements and … each hall supports 5MW of allocated critical IT power load,” the company said.
The new data halls are “liquid-to-liquid cooling” enabled, allowing clients to deploy high-density, air-cooled cloud deployments and direct-to-chip cooling for dense artificial intelligence workloads.
“JB4 has been designed with sustainability at its core, incorporating a state-of-the-art closed-loop chilled water system that provides free air cooling, coupled with AI enabled technology to configure data hall cooling in real time, based on IT load and load dispersion,” Teraco said.
The JB4 expansion, built to “stringent global hyperscale specifications”, follows the recent completion of Teraco’s new hyperscale JB5 Isando facility 20km east of the Bredell site. This data centre adds another 30MW of critical IT power load to the Isando campus.
Hub
“South Africa has become the technology and data centre hub for sub-Saharan Africa, acting as a springboard for cloud, AI and content provision into Africa,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo in the statement.
Read: Teraco turns to the wind to power its data centres
“Massive global investments in undersea cables, such as Equiano and 2Africa, further strengthen this position. This will enable global cloud providers to service not only the South African market but also the rest of the sub-Saharan African region.”
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