The city of Joburg and neighbouring Ekurhuleni may be falling apart under venal and incompetent political administrations but in one important area, South Africa’s largest urban centre — home to millions of people — is doing rather well: it is attracting significant investment into data centres.
The region — especially around OR Tambo International Airport and parts of Midrand and Centurion — is experiencing an investment boom as companies build out the infrastructure needed to run modern enterprises and, increasingly, the power-intensive computing halls needed to run AI workloads at scale.
Though nowhere near the epic size of data centres being built in the US by the likes of Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, the facilities under construction in Gauteng are eye-opening in the African context.
Why? Because these data centres are expected to power not only demand from South Africa but much of Sub-Saharan Africa too. Apart from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has focused its South African spending on Cape Town, so-called “hyperscalers” have directed much of their investment into vast facilities in and around Joburg.
Indeed, the IT industry is scaling at speed, pulling in billions of rand in capital spending annually and drawing adjacent digital infrastructure along with it — and the Joburg region has emerged as the anchor hub for continent-wide interconnection and capacity.
At the centre of this investment is Teraco. You may have seen part of the company’s sprawling campus alongside the highway in Isando, en route to the airport — one of the few sites across Joburg and Ekurhuleni that’s had construction activity for more than a decade and a half as the rest of the regional economy stagnated.
In 2022, US-listed Digital Realty acquired a controlling stake in Teraco, a landmark deal that tied South Africa’s largest “co-location” platform into one of the world’s biggest data centre networks. Since then, Teraco has accelerated its expansion, in Joburg and, to a lesser extent, Cape Town.
Teraco has other sites on the East Rand and enjoys exemptions from power cuts, being on the airport grid. It has a good working relationship with the Ekurhuleni metro. Still, it’s also investing in green power and is building a utility-scale solar farm in the Free State. From here it will wheel renewable power to its facilities over the national grid.
Microsoft is also scaling up its Joburg data centre facilities (with partners) and is expanding in Cape Town, recently committing another R5.4bn over the next two years. AWS has built its largest African data centre region in Cape Town and continues to expand, pledging tens of billions of rand to its facilities in the Mother City.
But it’s in Gauteng where the main data centre investments are happening.
Gauteng is a regional interconnection hub, with fibre networks across Africa — both terrestrial and submarine
A growing constellation of global and regional players is piling in. Equinix opened “JN1” in Joburg in late 2024, marking the interconnection giant’s formal entry to South Africa. Vantage Data Centers is building out an 80MW, three-facility campus in Waterfall City, with additional phases under way. NTT Data’s Joburg 1 campus, offering up to 12MW of IT load, gives another blue-chip option for enterprises that need global operators on the ground. Telkom-owned BCX continues to operate facilities exceeding 16,000m² of hosting space.
Pan-African operator Africa Data Centres is expanding capacity and power autonomy. And Digital Parks Africa broke ground on a 12MW solar farm designed to feed its South African facilities under a long-term agreement. Open Access Data Centres, part of Wiocc Group, is growing a national footprint of so-called edge sites and core hubs.
But why the focus on Joburg and Ekurhuleni, which are crumbling under failing metros? Well, together they host the largest cluster of carrier-neutral facilities on the continent (meaning they’re not tied to a specific company or telecoms operator). In part, it’s the result of the world-class connectivity in the region. Gauteng is a regional interconnection hub, with fibre networks across Africa — both terrestrial and submarine — terminating in the region. The city is criss-crossed by fibre infrastructure, built by the private sector over the past two decades.
Data centres sit at the heart of AI, fintech, streaming, gaming, e-commerce and more. With Teraco’s rapid expansion, AWS and Microsoft’s fresh capital, and a panoply of global operators rounding out the market, the greater Joburg region is consolidating its position as the computing and AI hub for Africa — and the build-out appears to have plenty of room to run.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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