Teraco Expands Cape Town CT2 Data Centre to 50MW, Boosting Africa’s Hyperscale Capacity

Teraco:  A Digital Realty Company and provider of interconnection platforms and vendor-neutral colocation data centres, today announced the successful completion of its CT2 hyperscale data centre expansion in Cape Town, bringing the facility’s total critical IT load to 50 megawatts (MW).

This milestone marks a transformational step in South Africa’s digital infrastructure landscape and cements Teraco’s Cape Town campus as a premier hub for cloud, AI, and enterprise workloads. The expanded CT2 facility adds 32MW of new capacity delivered across eight new data halls and built over three levels.

“CT2’s expansion underscores our continued commitment to meeting the demand for large, hyperscale infrastructure in Africa. This facility expands Platform Teraco by providing clients with the ability to scale on demand, proven resilience, an extensive interconnected ecosystem, and a broad array of low latency connectivity options.”

– Jan Hnizdo, CEO, Teraco 

Enabling hyperscale and AI ambitions in Africa

Teraco’s CT2 infrastructure meets high density computing deployment needs and is designed to support liquid-to-liquid cooling. For clients deploying AI training clusters, inference nodes, or data lakes in Africa, CT2 offers connected and scalable infrastructure.

Platform Teraco’s ecosystem provides direct low-latency connectivity to cloud provider on-ramps, seamless peering via the NAPAfrica internet exchange point (IXP), and access to multiple carrier and content providers.

Teraco’s CT2 data centre is linked by diverse fibre routes to the CT1 facility and supports over 7,000 interconnects across the Cape Town Campus. The campus is connected to all the subsea cable systems that land in the Cape region, including ACE, Equiano, SAT-3, SAFE, WACS and 2Africa, amplifying the value of CT2 as a digital gateway for continental and global traffic.

Economic and sustainability impact

The expansion has created hundreds of local skilled construction jobs, facilitating economic growth and upliftment in the region. On an ongoing basis, this expansion will employ around 30 additional full-time employees.

In Cape Town, water scarcity has real meaning. The city faced a “Day Zero” water crisis in 2018 when it came close to running out of water, resulting in severe water restrictions being implemented. The CT2 data centre facility has been designed with sustainability at its core, incorporating a state-of-the-art zero water closed-loop cooling system. The system incorporates free air cooling, coupled with AI-enhanced technology to configure data hall cooling in real time, based on IT load and heat dispersion. This innovative design achieves industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE), significantly reducing energy consumption and, most importantly, using zero water during the cooling process.

Beyond optimising energy efficiency, Teraco is advancing a bold renewable energy strategy by developing its own 120MW solar PV plant to supply clean energy to its data centres, including CT2, through energy wheeling. This initiative marks a significant step toward sustainability, as Teraco will own the renewable energy plants that power its data centres reflecting Teraco’s long-term vision: powering digital innovation across Africa sustainably. This holistic approach is designed to support the next generation of cloud and AI computing, while reducing the environmental impact.