Teraco wants the land next to its biggest Cape Town data centre, substation and all

Teraco, the data centre operator owned by US-listed Digital Realty, wants to buy a large plot of vacant industrial land in Brackenfell, next to its biggest Cape Town data centre. The Competition Commission said on 22 October that it has recommended the Competition Tribunal approve the deal without conditions.

The land comes with a substation and a new electricity supply, which the Commission lists as part of what is being bought. Teraco has not said what it will build there, but the purchase puts more room for data centre capacity beside a site that already carries most of its Cape Town load.

If the Tribunal agrees, Teraco gets room to grow its Cape Town campus on land that already has a power connection, rather than starting a new site elsewhere in the city.

What the Commission said

The buyer is Teraco Properties, a subsidiary of Teraco Data Environments that holds the property behind Teraco's data centres. Digital Realty Trust, a New York Stock Exchange-listed company incorporated in Maryland, ultimately controls it.

The target is vacant industrial land at Erf 25704 Brackenfell, zoned for general industrial use. The Commission says nothing has been built on it apart from the substation infrastructure, and no business is run from it.

It found the deal unlikely to substantially prevent or lessen competition in any market, and said it raises no significant public interest concerns. The Tribunal still has to give final approval. The price was not disclosed.

The site next door

Teraco's CT2 facility is at 57 Tiber Road, Brackengate 2, in Brackenfell. Teraco's website lists 18,000 square metres of white space and an IT load of 50MW there. Its older CT1 site in Rondebosch has 2,500 square metres and a 5MW load.

MyBroadband located the plot in the Morgan Industria area, reached from Tiber Road, directly beside CT2. It reported that the City of Cape Town's public GIS puts the land at about 66,025 square metres, or roughly 6.6 hectares.

Teraco told MyBroadband the project is at a very early stage, that it has not confirmed how far its plans will go, and that it will hold discussions with the City of Cape Town.

What is still open

Data centre projects in Cape Town have not always gone smoothly. MyBroadband noted that Equinix's planned data centre at King Air Industria Park stalled after a petition by the Cape Town Housing Assembly, the South African Human Rights Commission and the UK non-profit Foxglove.

Teraco's next steps are the Tribunal hearing and talks with the city. It has not given a building plan, a capacity figure for the new land or a timeline, and the City of Cape Town did not respond to MyBroadband's request for comment.