Artist's impression of the expanded CT2
Data centre and interconnection hub company Teraco will expand its CT2 hyperscale data centre facility in Brackenfell, Cape Town, by 30 MW to 50 MW. The expansion will be completed in early 2025 and will incorporate environmentally sustainable cooling and water management designs.
The facility's expansion caters for the increasing demand by enterprise customers and hyperscale cloud providers for data centre capacity. The CT2 facility offers resilient and secure colocation facilities.
“Teraco is committed to growing its capacity footprint across its core hubs. We ensure our clients have the flexibility to scale and take advantage of the digital transformation across sub-Saharan Africa. We continue to invest significantly in the region’s information and communication technology infrastructure to provide open access interconnection and world-class data centre infrastructure for our clients,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo.
The new CT2 facility represents a strategic addition to Platform Teraco. It offers enterprises a scalable platform for information technology (IT) infrastructure deployment, while providing performance, reliability, stringent security and the widest choice of carriers and network service providers, which is a crucial component in building a robust interconnection strategy, he added.
CT2 Phase 2 will comprise four data halls of 5.3 MW, two data halls of 3.1 MW, and a further two data halls of 2.2 MW. It will be built over three levels upon completion, and the entire CT2 facility will then support a total IT load of 50 MW.
The data centre expansion is being built in line with global hyperscale requirements and increases the critical power load capacity at all Teraco facilities to 185 MW.
Further, CT2 has been designed for sustainability and to minimise its environmental footprint. It incorporates state-of-the-art cooling designs with a closed-loop chilled water system that offers 100% free air cooling. This design introduces industry-leading power use effectiveness by minimising energy consumption and reduces water used in the ongoing cooling process to zero.
On completion, CT2 will comprise 73 000 m2 with 90 MVA of utility power supply and will have monitoring technology to reduce water use and improve energy efficiency. The expansion will add eight data halls, taking the total facility to 16 halls with 18 000 m2 of deployment space.
CT2 is connected to CT1 with diverse fibre routes as the broader Cape Town Campus. This provides enterprises with direct access to Platform Teraco, which hosts more than 250 network providers, has access to global cloud on-ramps, subsea cable systems, more than 50 managed service providers and direct peering at Internet exchange point NAPAfrica.
Clients deployed in either of these facilities can connect directly to AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute or via Teraco’s Africa Cloud Exchange.
Cape Town is a logical destination for Teraco’s continued investment into data centre infrastructure as one of Africa’s most digitally connected cities. The city benefits from its location at the southern tip of Africa and is the confluence point for major subsea cable systems, such as Equiano, Africa Coast to Europe, West Africa Cable System and South Atlantic 3/South Africa Far East, with the 2AFRICA cable system expected to land soon.