From opening its first data centre in Johannesburg in 2024 to pumping billions of dollars across the African continent, Equinix is eager to capitalise on the AI boom.
It was recently announced that the global data centre provider would be building more facilities in South Africa as part of a R7.5 billion ($438 million) plan to make the most of AI. As reported by Bloomberg last week, Equinix director for South Africa Sandile Dube said the company has bought more land in both Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“We have now secured 327 000 square meters of land and plan to build further data centre capacity of 160 megawatts (MW),” Dube said during the interview. “All investments are funded by our own balance sheet, and our intention is to do so with all of our future investments in South Africa.”
Equinix Johannesburg has become an essential new hub and fast-growing interconnection point for the company since it first built in the region in 2024. Being a strongly developed economy, the city attracts plenty of local and international investment.
In South Africa alone, the data centre market is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2025 to more than $5 billion by 2031, according to Arizton Advisory & Intelligence.
Equinix is currently planning for an extra 160MW and has 172MW currently under construction, to add to its 409MW of operational data centre capacity currently hosted across Africa.
“All the major hyper-scalers have landed in South Africa,” Dube told Bloomberg. “The trend that we see from all the investors is to not only target the South African market, but also to target the African opportunity.”
Equinix also has a presence in West Africa, having opened its first purpose-built site in the region at the end of last year. The site, located in Lagos, was built to extend access to Equinix Fabric, the firm’s global interconnection platform, giving Nigerian businesses secure, low-latency links to international cloud services and partners.
“Our plan is to execute our strategy in the markets that we are in today; depending on how those investments perform, that will inform our investments into the rest of the continent,” Dube continued.
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