My first conversation was with the CEO of Teraco Jan Hnizdo. When I arrived for my conversation appointment at Teraco’s JB3 data centre in Isando, I was so overwhelmed by the enormity and number of data centre buildings lining the street that the first question that came into my mind was, “Are we not creating an oversupply of data centres?” I mean, JB3 is not yet fully equipped and another 40 Megawatt data centre is under construction across the road.

Some time ago, I asked the same question from the undersea cable provider - would the market not be over supplied? Clearly not as Jan and I talked about the current failure of two cables connecting South Africa with the world and the cable repair vessel some 8000km away on another repair mission. “With many undersea cables terminating in Cape Town and Durban, there is much resilience in the system. We have ten undersea cables terminating in our facilities and about 250 carriers connected to our data centres. If an enterprise is connected to a service provider and the cable they are connecting to breaks down, they can be switched to another cable and quickly restore their service. This is where we have played an important part over the past few weeks; so much so that many clients have reported minimal internet connection disruption.

“South Africa is also an ideal location for cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google as well as content providers. We have all the cables from the West coast and East coast as well as a relatively stable power supply relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. I know it may not always seem so, but countries like Nigeria run their data centres off diesel.

Jan talked much about the need to be energy efficient as one the most important aspects for data centre growth. It is that commodity that the world is most short of. Burning more coal or diesel is not an option, the reverse is the case. The focus must be on green energy and lots of it.

 “We are on a journey. The world is only at the beginning of themdata journey. We are not even halfway there! If you asked me ten years ago, my answer would have been wrong; even two years ago, I would have been wrong. Data will expand and data centres are needed to host that data! Over supply? No!’’

You can read my full interview here