South Africa’s data centre capacity has been growing steadily over the years as demand for cloud computing and storage services has expanded.
Seen as a window into the African continent, the South African industry attracts investment from global entities looking to use their local presence as an anchor and a proving ground for future builds in other parts of Africa.
This privileged position has led to South Africa boasting many of the largest data centres on the continent, but even these are dwarfed by the facilities being built elsewhere, including in the US, Europe and China.
The generative AI boom is spurring a new wave of investment into US data centre capacity and the scale of planned builds is breathtaking. As an example, South Africa’s largest data centre is the Isando Campus, built by Teraco, with 70MW of IT load capacity. The largest proposed AI data centre build in the US, Open AI’s Project Stargate, will have IT load capacity in the region of 10 000MW.
NTT Data’s Johannesburg 1 data centre is sixth on TechCentral’s list of South Africa’s largest data centres, boasting 6 200sq m of white space and 12MW IT load capacity. Speaking to TechCentral in a recent interview, Greg Hatfield, vice president for infrastructure solutions at NTT Data, said it will take some time before AI-driven investments spur an infrastructure boom in South Africa.
Investment case
“It is a bit early to expect significant investment driven by AI in South Africa and in Africa. If you look at macro technology trend adoption cycles, they take a long time, about seven to 10 years,” said Hatfield.
“If you go back to the days of the internet from 1995, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s when organisations saw the real opportunity of e-commerce and saw the internet as more than just an advertising billboard for their brand. The same happened with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and outsourcing of wide-area networks, and even cloud technology.”
Hatfield said the reason behind the five-to-10-year lag in mass adoption is that, for the enterprise, there is seldom a clear-cut business case for nascent technologies, even if the notion that the technology will have a significant impact down the line does exists.
10 largest data centres in South Africa
| Data centre | Company | White space (sq m) | IT load (MW) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isando Campus | Teraco | 32 000 | 70 |
| Bredell Campus | Teraco | 21 000 | 63 |
| Breckenfell Campus | Teraco | 18 000 | 50 |
| Johannesburg I | Vantage Data Centres | 12 000 | 16 |
| JHB1 | Africa Data Centres | 8 500 | 20 |
| Johannesburg 1 | NTT Data | 6 200 | 12 |
| JHB2 | Africa Data Centres | 6 000 | 10 |
| CPT1 | Africa Data Centres | 3 600 | 10 |
| CT1 | Teraco | 2 500 | 3 |
| DPA Samrand | Digital Parks Africa | 2 400 | 24 |
“It is difficult to extract money and make investments if you don’t have clarity of the business case. Our clients are obviously paying a lot of attention to AI, but most of the implementations are related to internal individual staff productivity benefits, some tactical automation and agentic AI. There are lots of experiments, but they are not enterprise-wide massive investments,” he said.
It is only once South African enterprises use AI at scale that hyperscalers and other infrastructure players will be able to justify the investment case for increased local AI compute capacity. AI computations are resource intensive, requiring higher levels of power – and as a consequence more water for cooling – as inputs. This is one of the reasons why – and there are many – that the scale of AI data centres in the US is so massive.
4 largest planned AI data centres in the US
| Project/company | Location(s) | Investment | IT load (planned capacity) | White space (sq m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI's Stargate (with Oracle & SoftBank) | Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, Wisconsin | $500-billion | Up to 10GW | 100 000+ |
| Meta Platforms | Louisiana | $10-billion | Estimated at 2.2GW | 371 612 |
| Vantage Data Centers (Frontier Campus) | Texas | $25-billion | 1.4 GW | 343 741 |
| Microsoft (Fairwater Campus) | Wisconsin | $7-billion | Not explicitly disclosed (capacity is a single "massive AI supercomputer") | 111 484 |
Even so, investment into local AI capacity, although smaller relative to the US, is gaining traction. In March, Microsoft committed to making a US$5.4-billion investment into South Africa, which includes capacity in cloud and AI infrastructure. The move promises to make high-end Nvidia GPUs more easily available to South Africa, especially since Microsoft holds preferred distributor status under the US’s AI Diffusion Framework – a policy that controls who can purchase high-end AI chips.
Teraco’s JB5 data centre contributes 30MW IT load capacity to the 70MW in total of its Isando campus. JB5 is described by Teraco as an AI-ready facility that houses state-of-the-art GPUs that specialise in AI workloads.
Read: Digital fortress: We go inside JB5, Teraco’s giant new AI-ready data centre
“Enterprises are increasingly demanding high-performance infrastructure to support AI workloads. Teraco’s partnership with Nvidia through the DGX-Ready programme reflects strong enterprise interest in robust AI infrastructure. Altron’s operational AI Factory – hosted at Teraco and powered by Nvidia – offers clients access to comprehensive AI tools, infrastructure and support, while ensuring data sovereignty and regulatory compliance,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo, in an e-mailed response to a query by TechCentral. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here.
Read: What Microsoft’s R5.4-billion AI investment means for South Africa
