Emma Okonji
The Chief Executive Officer of Medallion Data Centre Limited, Ikechukwu Nnamani, has said the recent acquisition of Teraco in a $3.5bn valuation, by Digital Realty, will boost data operations across Africa.
According to Nnamani, the transaction, which valued Teraco’s Data Centre assets at $3.5 billion represents the biggest data centre transaction on the continent.
This, he stated, would lead to significant foreign direct investment into the economy, boosting the GDP of the African countries, creating employment, and improving the quality of the lives of the citizens in the areas of education, healthcare, e-commerce, entertainment, security, governance, and agriculture amongst others. With the digitisation of the economy and implementation of Internet of Things services, data centres are essential to support these emerging services.
Digital Realty acquired controlling stake in Africa’s largest data centre operator, Teraco Data Environments of South Africa.
Teraco is the largest and most densely interconnected data centre platform in Africa, with seven state-of-the-art facilities strategically located in the key South African metros of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Teraco serves over 600 customers, including more than 275 connectivity providers, over 25 cloud and content platforms and approximately 300 enterprises. Teraco facilitates approximately 22,000 interconnections between customers and its Isando campus in Johannesburg is one of the most densely interconnected sites in the world, with over 13,000 cross-connects. Teraco also hosts seven on-ramps to leading global cloud service providers in Johannesburg and Cape Town and currently provides direct access to seven subsea cables in Durban on the east coast and Cape Town on the southwest coast
In October last year, the Austin Texas, USA based Digital Realty also announced the acquisition of the data centre assets of Medallion Communications Limited in Nigeria.
“That marked the first time a global pure real estate investment trust (REIT) will be entering the country and beats rivals including Equinix, CyrusOne and CoreSite Realty on entrance into the market. With the additional acquisition of Teraco, Digital Realty now controls the two most important data center assets on the continent,” Nnamani said.
He added, “The Medallion Data Centre is one of the peering and connectivity data centre in Nigeria and Teraco represents the same in South Africa, two of the largest economies in the continent. The combination of Teraco’s leading position in South Africa with Digital Realty’s leading connectivity hubs in Nigeria on the west and Kenya on the east coast – along with Digital Realty’s strategic Mediterranean interconnection hubs in Marseille and Athens – is expected to significantly strengthen Digital Realty’s leading pan-African position, enhancing the ability to serve local as well as multinational enterprises and service providers.”
Nnamani stated the investment into Teraco by Digital Realty is a further testament further stated that Digital Realty remained fully commitment to grow the digital economy, not only in Nigeria and the West African sub-region, but also the whole of Africa.
Digital Realty is the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centres, colocation and interconnection solutions. Digital Realty supports the world’s leading enterprises and service providers by delivering the full spectrum of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions.
PlatformDIGITAL, the company’s global data centre platform, provides customers a trusted foundation and proven Pervasive Data Centre Architecture (PDx) solution methodology for scaling digital business and efficiently managing data gravity challenges. Digital Realty’s global data centre footprint gives customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with more than 280 facilities in 48 metros across 24 countries on six continents.
Medallion Data Centre, which is located in Lagos, is the leading connectivity hub in Western Africa with approximately 70 carriers and internet service providers, over 80 per cent of the public peering traffic of the Nigerian Internet Exchange takes place at the carrier neutral data centre.
