Africa Data Centres, a business of Cassava Technologies, a pan-African technology group, recently announced a second data centre in Cape Town. The new facility, located in the city's north, will have a 20 MW IT load. Construction is already underway, and the facility will be operational by the mid of 2024.
The construction of the new Data Centre is a part of the company's wider-scale African expansion plans, which will see Africa Data Centres building several new DCs across the continent.
Investments in African Market
Africa Data Centres is further increasing its investments in the African market and focusing on Cape Town as a location for deployments to provide customers with world-class facilities. This enables customers to put down multiple sites for redundancy or gives them an additional option in the market.
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According to Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres, the company is building this second facility to meet demand in the region and beyond. Cape Town is a thriving city and the second largest economy in South Africa. It is regarded as the country's IT and software hub, and we are seeing significant growth in the data centre market in the region. It is a preferred site for both global and local providers of cloud software and IT services. We built and operate the first hyperscale colocation data centre in the city, which already houses a number of global providers alongside major South African enterprises and government, and this second facility will add capacity to the region, and redundancy too."
Hardy Pemhiwa, Group President & CEO of Cassava Technologies, said: "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."
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Second Cape Town facility
The data centre will be 12,000 square metres, the space available for customers to lease, although the physical site will be much larger than that.
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-largest city in South Africa and one of the most popular tourist destinations. Consequently, Cape Town is a prime location for data centres and within easy reach of all the submarine cable landing stations. The new data centre is also positioned to provide geographic redundancy from Africa Data Centres' other facility, which lies in the south of the city, offering customers the option of deploying in two locations.
New Sameer facility in Nairobi
Recently, Africa Data Centres also started constructing its new Sameer facility in Nairobi. The new build will expand the existing facility on the adjacent piece of land to an extra 15 MW of IT load. ADC's expansion at the new site will be completed in the first half of 2024 and will add five times more capacity than currently installed. The new data facility will initially start with 5 MW of IT load.
ADC in Kenya is fortunate enough to use almost 70% of grid power from green energy sources.
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The second Cape Town facility is being built to ADC's new standard modular design, and the Sameer facility is being built in the company's leading-edge modular design. The expansion of new Sameer facility in Nairobi will be completed in the first half of 2024 and the second Cape Town facility will be up and running by mid-2024.
These two Data Centers are part of ADC's expansion plans announced in 2021, which will see the company investing USD 500 million into building hyperscale data centres across Africa with the support of the US Development Finance Corporation.
