Equinix is scaling its Johannesburg 1 data centre to 24MW to meet growing AI and cloud demand — while holding back development on land it has bought in Johannesburg and Cape Town until it sees whether that demand materialises.
The US digital infrastructure company entered South Africa in 2024 with a $160 million investment in JN1, its first international business exchange facility in the country, located in Germiston on the East Rand near OR Tambo International Airport. Phase one is complete at 4MW, with two further phases of 10MW each planned.
“Since inception, we’ve received a great reception from the South African market,” said Sandile Dube, managing director for South Africa at Equinix, in an interview with ITWeb during a tour of the facility.
Budget allocated, ground not broken
Equinix has earmarked R7.5 billion for South African expansion and acquired additional land in Johannesburg and Cape Town earlier this year. Dube was direct that neither site is under development.
“The additional land parcels give us the option to expand over a period of time as the business evolves and demand develops,” he said. The immediate focus remains the phased build-out of Johannesburg 1, with later capacity additions dependent on customer requirements.
That posture is worth noting against the run of South African data centre announcements this year. Cape Town approved two hyperscale facilities totalling around 174MW three weeks ago. Durban’s council approved exploratory agreements for a project referenced at 400MW. Microsoft has committed more than R26 billion across Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and a planned Centurion facility.
Equinix’s full Johannesburg build, at 24MW, amounts to roughly one-seventh of what Cape Town waved through in a single sitting — and two-thirds of it is conditional. For a company with the balance sheet to move faster, the sequencing reads as a judgement about how quickly South African enterprise demand will actually arrive.
Designed for AI from the start
Dube said AI is shaping how Equinix provisions its South African infrastructure, with Johannesburg 1 built for the power and cooling densities AI workloads require, including liquid-cooling infrastructure.
“We’ve been quite fortunate in that we are relatively new in the South African market and therefore the facility that we are in today has been designed and built with that in mind,” he said.
That timing advantage is real. Turner & Townsend’s data centre construction cost index identified 2025 as the inflexion point from air-cooled cloud facilities to high-density liquid-cooled builds for AI — and found that 83% of industry leaders surveyed considered local supply chains unprepared for the specialised materials, equipment and expertise advanced cooling demands. Operators retrofitting existing halls face that constraint directly. Equinix does not.
Johannesburg is the third most expensive African market for data centre construction at $10.06 per watt, behind Lagos at $10.50 and Cape Town at $10.33, according to the same index.
Interconnection over colocation
Dube was insistent the proposition is not straightforward colocation. Equinix positions JN1 as an access point to a global ecosystem of more than 10,500 customers spanning cloud providers, systems integrators and connectivity companies.
“South Africa is already the gateway to the rest of Africa,” he said, citing the country’s position between the Atlantic and Indian oceans and its comparatively developed digital infrastructure.
The South African approach also differs from Equinix’s West African entry, which came via acquisition. In South Africa the company built greenfield, with Johannesburg 1 as the foundation.
Africa accounts for roughly 1% of the world’s data centres. McKinsey projects continental capacity needs to rise from about 0.4 gigawatts to as much as 2.2 gigawatts by 2030. Whether that materialises depends less on announced budgets than on how many operators, having secured the land, decide the demand justifies breaking ground.
