The JB4 data center is a hyperscale colocation facility at Teraco’s Bredell Campus in Ekurhuleni, South Africa. Teraco has now completed a second construction phase, adding six liquid cooled data halls and lifting JB4’s critical IT power to 50 megawatts, making it the largest standalone data center built on the continent.
JB4 Expansion Mirrors Global Race for AI Ready Capacity
The upgrade equips JB4 with cooling built for dense AI workloads and lifts Teraco’s South African platform to 189 megawatts of critical power. Digital Realty owned Teraco is also building a 40 megawatt facility, JB7, at its Isando campus. A similar pattern is unfolding in South Korea, where SK Telecom’s SK AI Data Center Ulsan is scaling from an initial 103 megawatts toward nearly 900 megawatts as AI demand keeps outpacing planning assumptions.
Project Overview
- Project Name: JB4 Data Center, Bredell Campus
- Location: Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, South Africa
- Owner and Operator: Teraco, a Digital Realty company
- Project Value: Not publicly disclosed
- Critical IT Power: 50 megawatts, up from 19 megawatts at first phase completion
- Latest Expansion: Six new liquid cooled data halls added in the second construction phase, each supporting 5 megawatts of allocated power
- Cooling System: Liquid to liquid cooling built for dense AI and cloud workloads, with a closed loop chilled water system
- Platform Context: Part of Teraco’s South African platform, now totaling 189 megawatts of critical power across Isando, Bredell, Cape Town and Durban
- Construction Start: First phase completed November 2022; second phase completed August 2025
- Strategic Impact: Now the largest standalone data center built in Africa
Project Team
- Owner and Operator: Teraco
- Parent Company: Digital Realty
- Financier: Absa and other lenders, through an 8 billion rand syndicated loan financing JB7 and other Teraco campus construction
Reported 5th November 2022: Teraco, a provider of data centers and interconnection platforms, recently completed the first phase of the JB4 data center, a new hyper-scale facility addition at the Bredell Campus in Ekurhuleni. The facility has been built to meet the growing demand for data center capacity from enterprises and cloud providers.
According to Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo, JB4’s resilient and secure colocation facilities are in line with Teraco’s long-term vision of driving digital transformation in Africa.
Read also: New Safaricom data center to be established close to Addis Ababa
JB4’s first phase includes 30,000 square meters of the building structure, an 8,000 square meter data hall, and also 19 MW of critical power load.
Through a diverse ecosystem of network operators, JB4 is connected to all other Teraco data centers.
Teraco’s continued investment in greater Johannesburg is a logical decision. A number of fiber paths also link the facility to the Teraco Isando campus connectivity hub.
The JB4 data center location
It is roughly 20 kilometers west of the site. Eight 1,000-square-meter halls are included in Phase 1. It was built in line with international compliance standards and also global hyperscale requirements.
According to Teraco, it has now acquired adjacent land and power for phase 2 of the project. This brings the facility’s total critical power load to 50 MW throughout the large Bredell site.
The greater Johannesburg, in particular, is a logical destination for Teraco’s continued investment in data center infrastructure on the continent. This is according to what the company said in a statement. Gauteng is one of Africa’s economic giants.
Johannesburg enjoys an advantageous location in the center of Southern Africa. This has led to it becoming the hub for connectivity and peering. Additionally, it is home to digitally connected enterprises in the fields of telecommunications, financial services, e-commerce, logistics, and retail.
The facility’s impact on Teraco’s power load capacity
With the JB4 data center addition, Teraco’s platform now has a total critical power load capacity of 126 MW, spread across its sites in Isando (JB1/JB3; 40 MW), Bredell (JB2/JB4; 64 MW), Cape Town (CT1/CT2; 21 MW), and Durban (1 MW).
The company is undergoing huge growth as hyperscale requirements expand due to higher demand for cloud services in Africa. This is according to Teraco CEO, Jan Hnizdo.
He said that investments in vital infrastructures, such as hyperscale data center facilities like JB4, have also led to the continued increase in cloud adoption in Africa.
According to him, this will enable global cloud clients to service the South African market. It will also serve the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
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