The Digital Fortress: Inside Teraco, the SA Company Powering Africa’s Internet

Tucked away in unassuming buildings across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban lies a physical empire of the digital age. Teraco, South Africa’s largest data centre company, now boasts enough white spacethe pristine, cooled area dedicated to serversto cover roughly ten rugby fields. This sprawling 75,400m² network has become the unshakeable bedrock of Africa’s internet.

What began in 2007 as a vision by three telecoms veterans to create a vendor-neutral co-location spacewhere any company could house its servers, free from the control of a single telecom providerhas evolved into a critical piece of continental infrastructure. Its growth mirrors the explosive demand for data, a demand that Teraco has not only met but actively fuelled.

The Game-Changer: NAPAfrica

Perhaps Teraco’s single most significant contribution to the South African internet landscape was the creation of NAPAfrica, the continent’s first vendor-neutral Internet Exchange Point (IXP). Think of an IXP as a grand central station for internet traffic. Before NAPAfrica, local internet service providers (ISPs) had to route local data through expensive international links.

By offering free peering at NAPAfrica, Teraco encouraged global giants like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Meta (Facebook) to place their content servers directly inside its facilities. This meant that when you stream a show or load a website, the data doesn’t have to travel from overseas; it comes from just a few kilometres away.

The result? Internet costs plummeted, paving the way for the affordable, uncapped broadband packages South Africans enjoy today. The success is staggering: NAPAfrica recently hit a traffic throughput of six terabits per second, a six-fold increase in just five years.

Hyperscale Growth and a Greener Future

Teraco’s campuses are in a constant state of expansion to feed the insatiable appetite of the cloud. Its largest facility in Isando, Johannesburg, offers a massive 32,000m² of space. Meanwhile, its newest hyperscale data centres in Cape Town (CT2) and Johannesburg (JB4) each boast a formidable 50MW of critical IT power enough to power tens of thousands of servers.

This immense power consumption comes with a responsibility to the planet. Teraco is undertaking a massive green energy shift. It is expanding its rooftop solar capacity, has secured power from a 120MW solar plant in the Free State, and signed agreements for wind power. The goal is ambitious: 50% renewable energy by 2027, and 100% by 2035.

Acquired by US-based Digital Realty in 2022 for a monumental R56 billion, Teraco’s story is a testament to South African innovation. From a simple idea to an indispensable utility, it has quietly become the fortress guarding and distributing the digital lifeblood of the nation.

{Source: MyBroadband}

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