Vantage Data Centres builds its first African data centre in Johannesburg

JOHANNESBURG Reuters - Vantage Data Centres is investing more than 15 billion shares in its first African campus in Johannesburg for the past 12 months, the U.S. - based company said on Wednesday.

The expansion underscores the growing demand for cloud services even in relatively undeveloped corners of the technology universe.

Vantage's carrier-neutral 80 megawatt capacity facility will include 60,000 square metres of data space across three facilities in Africa, once fully developed, making it the largest in Johannesburg, the statement said.

The first phase of the campus is scheduled for completion by the third quarter of 2022 and will be served with its own High Voltage Substation on site, Vantage added. It will be developed by Attacq, one of South Africa's largest property developers.

Johannesburg is the data centre hub for African sub Saharan Africa due to its strategic location, IT ecosystem, connectivity to the rest of Africa and the availability of renewable energy, said Antoine Boniface, president of Vantage EMEA.

For companies, having local cloud storage would save costs since they would be able to rent storage instead of building their own server or relying on other countries.

The global provider of wholesale data centres will challenge Amazon.com Inc, which has also increased its presence in the emerging tech hub of Cape Town.

Nokia Corp has also built two data centres in Johannesburg, one in Cape Town and one in South Africa, while China's Huawei started building two data centers in South Africa in 2019.