Colocation · Isando, Johannesburg, South Africa

Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg

Africa's most interconnected data center, hosting NAPAfrica, the continent's largest IXP

Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg on the mapmap: Natural Earth (public domain)

The story

Founded in 2008 as Africa's first vendor-neutral colocation provider, Teraco opened its JB1 facility in Isando, Johannesburg in 2009. JB1 quickly became the beating heart of the African internet. It hosts NAPAfrica, an open internet exchange routing multi-terabit traffic across 500 networks. To overcome South Africa's chronic electrical grid instabilities and Eskom load-shedding, JB1 maintains an industrial battery and generator farm that keeps critical global cloud on-ramps online 24/7.

Notable

Houses NAPAfrica, the largest Internet Exchange Point in Africa with over 500 connected networks.
Connects directly to all major subsea cable systems landing in South Africa (WACS, SAT-3, Equiano, 2Africa).
Serves as the primary African cloud interconnection on-ramp for AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute.
Maintains massive on-site diesel reservoirs to ensure uninterrupted 100% uptime through Eskom load-shedding.

Expansions

2017: JB1-East expansion doubling total campus whitespace to 18,000 m²
2021: Digital Realty multi-billion dollar acquisition solidifying Teraco as pan-African nexus

Operator	Teraco
Owner	Digital Realty
Type	Colocation
Location	Isando, Johannesburg, South Africa
Opened	2009
Status	operating
IT power	35 MW
Total power	48 MW
PUE	1.4 (reported)
Site area	70,000 m²
Building area	35,000 m²
Cooling	closed circuit chillers, free cooling coils, variable speed CRAC units
Power	grid source: Eskom (direct high-voltage feeds from City Power / Ekurhuleni) · renewable pct: 25 % · onsite generation: massive on-site diesel generator farm with multi-day fuel storage · backup: diesel
Certifications	ISO 27001, ISO 9001, PCI DSS, ISAE 3402

See it on the earth

Record confidence: high. Values marked "estimated" are estimates in the source data.

Sources

Teraco Isando Campus JB1 Specification Sheet · Teraco · 2024-01-10
Inside Teraco's giant new data centre in Johannesburg · TechCentral South Africa · 2021-11-25
How Teraco's massive data centers survive Eskom load-shedding without dropping a packet · MyBroadband · 2022-01-15

Part of the open famous data centers dataset (CC BY 4.0). Updated 2026-10-15. A correction? da@mustardseedmt.com

Questions people ask

What is Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg famous for?

Africa's most interconnected data center, hosting NAPAfrica, the continent's largest IXP

Where is Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg?

Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg is in Isando, Johannesburg, South Africa (-26.142, 28.204). It is operated by Teraco.

How much power does Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg use?

About 35 MW of IT load and 48 MW in total, according to the sources listed on this page.

What is the PUE of Teraco Isando JB1 Johannesburg?

1.4, reported.