Equinix, Inc., a digital infrastructure company, announced plans to enter the South African market with a US$160 million data center investment in Johannesburg, which will complement its existing footprint on the African continent in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. The new data center is scheduled to open in the middle of 2024.
Equinix is expanding into South Africa, one of the continent’s largest and most digitally developed countries. South Africa already has a significant network of submarine communications cables, making it a strategically important connectivity hub for digital networks. These strategic connections between countries and continents are established at various points along the country’s 2,850 kilometers of coastline.
“We entered the African continent earlier this year with the acquisition of MainOne, the leading West African data center and connectivity solutions provider with presence in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire,” said Eugene Bergen, President, EMEA, Equinix. “This investment will give both South African businesses the opportunity to expand internationally and global businesses to expand into South Africa. Both will be able to accelerate their growth by rapidly scaling their infrastructure, easily adopting hybrid multicloud architectures and interconnecting with business partners through the Platform Equinix ecosystem of more than 10,000 customers.”
Equinix strives to be responsible stewards of the environment and the resources we use. We design, build, and operate sustainable data centers that are planned holistically to minimize resource consumption and maximize efficiency. We were the first data center company to set a science-based emission reduction target and commit to becoming climate neutral globally by 2030, in accordance with the Paris Agreement 1.5-degree scenario. We intend to source 100% clean and renewable energy for our global platform in the long term. Equinix’s renewable energy coverage was 95% in 2021, and it has been above 90% since 2018.
Equinix is looking for sustainable and reliable energy sources for this new data center, as is customary when entering a new market. While the search for sustainable and reliable energy sources continues, this new facility is expected to have many unique sustainable characteristics, such as hyper-efficient cooling with outside air economization using minimal water, allowing us to limit our carbon footprint and maintain energy efficient operations with industry leading PUEs.
The announcement is the most recent in a long line of strategic and significant market entries for the world’s digital infrastructure company. Equinix has announced two expansions into ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) following the recently announced plans to expand into Indonesia and Malaysia following the acquisition of MainOne in April 2022. Prior to this, the company announced expansion in the South American market with the acquisition of five Entel data centers in Peru and Chile to accelerate digital transformation opportunities for local businesses and multinational corporations. The company has also continued to invest in organic growth, with 46 major construction projects underway in 31 markets.
