By Chinenye Anuforo
The chief executive officer of Medallion Data Centre Limited, Ikechukwu Nnamani, has commended Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) on its acquisition of controlling stakes in Teraco Data Environments of South Africa, in a transaction that valued Teraco’s data-centre assets at $3.5bn. The acquisition was the biggest data-centre transaction on the continent.
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 provides direct access to seven subsea cables in Durban on the east coast and Cape Town on the southwest coast
It is worth noting that 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) would be entering the country and beat rivals, including Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), CyrusOne (NYSE: CONE), and CoreSite Realty (NYSE: COR), on entrance into the market.
With the additional acquisition of Teraco, Digital Realty now controls the two most important data-centre assets in Africa. The Medallion data centre is the number one peering and connectivity data centre in Nigeria, and Teraco represents the same in South Africa, two of the largest economies on the continent. The combination of Teraco’s leading position in South Africa with Digital Realty’s leading connectivity hubs in Nigeria and Kenya on the eastern 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 its ability to serve local and multinational enterprises and service providers.
Nnamani stated that the investment into Teraco by Digital Realty is a further testament that Digital Realty is fully committed to growing the digital economy in not only Nigeria and the West African sub-region but the whole of Africa, leading to significant foreign direct investment into the economy, boosting the GDP of African countries, creating employment and improving the quality of the life of citizens in the areas of education, healthcare, e-commerce, entertainment, security, governance and agriculture, among others.