Teraco Expands Its Cape Town Data Centre

Teraco, a Digital Realty company and leading provider of interconnection platforms and vendor-neutral colocation data centres, has completed the expansion of its CT2 hyperscale facility in Cape Town, boosting its total critical IT load to 50 megawatts (MW).

The project marks a major milestone for South Africa’s digital infrastructure landscape, positioning Teraco’s Cape Town campus as a central hub for cloud computing, AI workloads, and enterprise applications across the continent. The newly expanded CT2 facility adds 32MW of new capacity across eight data halls, built over three levels, bringing the campus’ total supported IT load to 50MW.

“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,” said Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco.

As AI and data-driven applications gain ground across Africa, demand for high-density computing and low-latency interconnectivity has never been higher. The CT2 facility is designed to meet these evolving needs, supporting liquid-to-liquid cooling for clients deploying AI training clusters, inference nodes, or large data lakes.

Through Platform Teraco, clients benefit from direct connectivity to major cloud provider on-ramps, seamless peering via the NAPAfrica internet exchange point (IXP), and access to multiple carrier and content providers.

The CT2 data centre connects to the existing CT1 facility via diverse fibre routes and supports over 7,000 interconnects across the Cape Town campus. It is also linked to all major subsea cable systems landing in the Cape region, including ACE, Equiano, SAT-3, SAFE, WACS, and 2Africa, reinforcing its role as a digital gateway for both continental and international traffic.

The expansion has generated hundreds of local construction jobs, contributing to regional economic growth and skills development. The facility will also employ around 30 new full-time staff on an ongoing basis.

Given Cape Town’s history of water scarcity, sustainability has been a key design priority. The CT2 facility features a zero-water, closed-loop cooling system that integrates free air cooling and AI-driven energy optimisation to manage heat dispersion in real time. This approach achieves industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE) while completely eliminating water usage in the cooling process.

Teraco is also advancing its renewable energy strategy through a 120MW solar PV project that will supply clean power to its data centres, including CT2, via energy wheeling. The company’s move to own and operate its renewable energy assets aligns with its long-term goal of powering Africa’s digital transformation sustainably.