The African data centre market is booming: valued at about $3,49-billion last year, it is tipped to hit $6,81-billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11,8%.
The rapid growth is seen in the number of new builds being carried out across the continent, particularly in the Johannesburg hotspot, where capacity is expected to double this year, from 400W to 800MW, and right up to 1,3GW by 2027.
South African customers are spoilt for choice when it comes to data centre availability, with facilities offered by Africa Data Centres (ADC), Teraco, Vantage Data Centres and Equinix.
In the rest of Africa, Raxio Group, Cloudoon, Kasi Cloud, Kemet Data Centre, Khazna Data Centres and Gulf Data Hub are all building out infrastructure.
Teraco Data Environments
Teraco has three campuses in Isando, with a total 70MW critical IT load, 125 000m² structure and 32 000m² of IT white space
Isando Campus JB1 is 10MW, JB3 is 30MW and JB5 is 30MW.
JB7 is under construction, to be complete in 2026, which will add 40MW.
The Bredell Campus JB2 has 13MW critical IT load, 17 000m² structure, 5 400m² of white space ; JB4 has 50MW critical IT load, 80 000m² structure and 16 000m² of white space
In Cape Town, CT1 (Rondebosch) has 3MW critical IT load, 6 100m² structure and 2 500m² of white space; CT2 (Brackenfell) has 50MW critical IT load, 73 000m² structure and 18 000m² of white space.
In Durban, Teraco’s DB1 (Riverhorse Valley) has 2 MW critical IT load, 3 500m² structure and 1 500m² of white space.
Teraco offers the following services:
* Carrier‑neutral colocation with 99.999% SLA, resilient power, intelligent cooling, and on‑site staging.
* Interconnection hub: physical and virtual cross-connects to 300+ network operators, all major cloud on-ramps (AWS, Azure, Google), 50+ content providers, 160+ IT service providers, and more than six IXPs including NAPAfrica with more than 27 000 interconnects.
* Africa Cloud Exchange (ACX): direct, private VLAN connections for hybrid/multi-cloud deployments.
* Peering via NAPAfrica – Africa’s largest IXP, five terabits/sec peak.
* Support services: 24/7 SLAs, 24/7 remote hands, client portal “ClientZone”, ticketing, nine layers of security to facilities access.
* Sustainability: free-air cooling, closed-loop chilled water systems (less than one quarter cup used per IT kW hour), wind and upcoming 120MW solar PPA, aiming for 50% renewable by 2027 and 100% by 2035, zero waste to landfill by 2028.
Africa Data Centres (ADC)
ADC has a capacity of 64MW in South Africa, with its Midrand and Samrand facilities expanding to reach a combined 100MW of IT load. JHB1 (Midrand) has 14,4MW and 9 000m²; JHB2 (Samrand) has 10MW and 6,000m².
In Cape Town, ADC’s CPT1 facility is 12MW; and CPT2 offer 20MW.
ADC has opened a 10MW data centre facility in Lagos, and has expanded its Nairobi facilities.
Vantage Data Centres
The Johannesburg I (JNB1) campus in Waterfall City is planned for an ultimate capacity of 80MW across three data centres covering 60 000 square meters. Vantage is also constructing a second Johannesburg data centre (JNB2) with a capacity of 20MW.
Equinix
Its JN1 data centre in Johannesburg initially provides 4MW of capacity, with plans for a fully completed campus reaching 20MW.
Equinix has facilities in 270 data centres across 6 continents, in 35 countries and 75 metros. In Africa, it is located in Abidjan, Accra, Johannesburg and Lagos
It offers dynamic connections to about 3 000 cloud and IT services, about 2 000 networks, more than 1 250 financial services, and upwards of 400 content and media services providers.
Airtel Nigeria
Airtel is building a 38MW hyperscale data centre in Lagos.
Open Access Data Centres (OADC)
OADC’s facility operates about 1,5MW in Accra, with a maximum site load design of 5MW, and plans to expand to 24MW by 2027. It will accommodate over 3 200 racks.
It also has a 2MW facility with capacity for over 550 racks in Kinshasa
OADC’s Lagos facility is the landing station for Google’s Equiano subsea cable..
Kasi Cloud
Kasi Cloud has a facility in Lagos.
Digital Realty
Digital Realty’s Accra ACR2 facility spans 1 100 m². In Mombasa MBA1 is 17 000 sqft), MBA2 is 18 000 sqft, and MBA3 will be up to 2,4MW of capacity. The MPM 1 facility in Maputo has 200m² of colocation space.
IXAfrica
IXAfrica operates a AI-ready Nairobi campus (NBOX1) with a design capacity of 22,5MW.
EcoCloud-G42
EcoCloud- G42 plans to develop a 100MW data centre in Kenya, scaling up to 1GW.
Global Data Centres
Global Data Centres, a division of NTT Data, operates more than 150 data centers in over 20 countries and regionskW/m
The Johannesburg 1 Data Centre in Samrand has more than 6 200m² of IT space; 20MVA of power, with an average power density of 2kW/ m², power supply at 20kV level and a maximum client IT load of 12MW.
It’s data centre is carrier- and cloud-neutral, offering high-performance Internet access and a multi-services interconnection platform.
Global Data Centres offers client implementation services, installation services, remote hands services, facility services and audit support services.
N+ONE Datacentres
With existing facilities in Morocco, N+One is planning to expand within the country and also into Senegal.
Kemet Data Centre
A planned data centre in Egypt will have an ultimate capacity of 80MW, able to house 10 000 cabinets.
Gulf Data Hub
A planned data centre in Egypt will have total storage capacity of 192MW and a power load of 300MW across three complexes.
Khazna Data Centre
A new entrant, Khazna operates in Middle East and North Africa. With global capacity above 235MW, it plans to expand in Africa.
Raxio Group
Raxio has a presence in 38 African countries, including a Tier III 7MW facility in Angola that can accommodate up to 800 racks, a Tier III 1,5MW data centre in Kinshasa, a Tier III data centre in Addis Ababa that can accommodate 800 racks, and operational facilities in Mozambique.
Hyperscalers
Many of the world’s largest cloud hyperscalers have a presence in Africa, mostly concentrated in South Africa from where they serve the rest of the continent.
- AWS – AWS has three Availability Zones in Cape Town, as well as edge locations in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Nairobi.
- Microsoft Azure – As of 2025, Microsoft has two primary Azure data centre regions in South Africa: South Africa North is located in Johannesburg, and South Africa West in Cape Town. Additionally, Microsoft is planning a R5,4-billion investment in new AI-focused data centres, as well as a new data centre campus in Centurion.
- Google Cloud – Google Cloud has a dedicated Africa region in Johannesburg, africa-south1, that offers a suite of cloud products, including Compute, Storage, Big Data and AI/ML services.
- Huawei Cloud
- IBM Cloud