Big, bigger, biggest: inside a hyperscale data centre campus in Johannesburg

Walking into Teraco’s Isando campus near Johannesburg in April 2025 was one of those moments where the abstract becomes very real. We talk about “the cloud” as if it were weightless. Standing inside a hyperscale data centre does the opposite: you see the cloud as steel, concrete, fibre, cooling systems, power feeds and security checkpoints. All very physical, and all very deliberate.

Our visit was to JB1, Teraco’s flagship facility, and we saw JB5 being built right next to it. That is where the title comes from: big, bigger, biggest.

JB1: where the cloud gets wired up

JB1 sits on Teraco’s Isando campus in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, and it is a digital crossroads for Southern Africa. Teraco designed its facilities to be neutral towards carriers and cloud providers: they do not push you towards one provider, but let enterprises, networks and cloud platforms meet in one place.

What makes it stand out, from an architect’s point of view:

• Connectivity density. Teraco describes Isando as one of the most interconnected environments in Africa.
• Direct on-ramps to the cloud through the Africa Cloud Exchange: ExpressRoute for Azure, Direct Connect for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloud Interconnect for Google Cloud.
• The NAPAfrica internet exchange inside the building, which keeps African internet traffic fast and local.

So JB1 is not just a building with racks. It is a platform where enterprises, internet service providers and cloud providers meet and connect.

The front door to Azure South Africa North

For our customers running workloads in Microsoft Azure South Africa North, the magic happens right here at JB1. This is where private ExpressRoute connections land: your network joins Microsoft’s backbone directly, without crossing the public internet. The region itself spreads over availability zones in several facilities around Johannesburg, so no single building carries a workload on its own. JB1 is the front door; the cloud is distributed.

Azure is not alone here. Through the Africa Cloud Exchange the other major cloud providers connect at the same place, which makes this entry point truly multi-cloud.

Power: the Johannesburg reality

You cannot tour a Johannesburg data centre without talking about power. South Africa’s grid has been under severe strain, and load shedding, the scheduled rolling blackouts, has been part of daily life.

Teraco engineers around it with redundant uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), generators and infrastructure designed to keep running through outages and maintenance. The chief executive described periods when grid availability was around 15 to 20 percent, with the campus running largely on diesel at a cost of millions of rand a month.

So Teraco committed to producing its own power: a 120 megawatt (MW) solar plant in the Free State, under construction since late 2024, that will deliver power to its data centres through the grid. That is not a sustainability marketing exercise. It is a response to real grid constraints.

JB5: the next generation

When we visited, JB5 was still under construction, but it was already a different animal from JB1. Teraco’s specifications for JB5:

• 30 MW of critical power load;
• 12 data halls of 1,000 square metres each;
• closed-loop chilled water cooling with 100 percent free air cooling, so no water is consumed for ongoing cooling.

It is clearly designed for modern workloads, especially artificial intelligence (AI) on graphics processing units (GPUs), and it connects to the same interconnection ecosystem as JB1.

What comes next

The Isando campus as a whole, with JB1, JB3 and JB5, is now a 70 MW facility. JB5 is the modern 30 MW hyperscale block; JB1 is the original anchor where the cloud on-ramps and peering live.

And Teraco is not stopping there. JB7, due in 2026, adds another 40 MW in eight halls of 1,500 square metres, bringing the campus to 110 MW. The trajectory is clear: JB1 was the anchor, JB3 and JB5 brought modern scale, and JB7 makes it bigger still.

Bringing the cloud down to earth

Data centres usually live in abstractions: regions, zones, resilience scores, peering diagrams. Walking through JB1, and watching JB5 rise, made them concrete.

• The cloud is not “somewhere else”. It is engineering decisions in a physical place: power, cooling, security and connectivity.
• Azure in South Africa is not just a region label. It is a private connectivity ecosystem that makes hybrid architectures real, and Teraco is one of its key connection points.
• Where electricity is genuinely scarce, resilience is not marketing. It is a cost line and a serious engineering priority.

The visit brought the cloud down to earth, and gave us a new respect for the scale and discipline it takes to make “always on” feel effortless. That respect shapes how we design for our customers: every architecture we deliver starts from where it physically runs and how it keeps running when something fails.

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