Grace Ashiru
U.S.-based Digital Realty offers a variety of services, including cloud and carrier-neutral data centers, colocation, and interconnection has said that a deal to buy a majority stake in Teraco, a carrier-neutral data center, and interconnection services provider in South Africa, has been completed.
The agreement to proceed with the transaction was reached in January, and it had been submitted to the Competition Commission of South Africa for regulatory approval. In April, the commission gave its approval to the transaction.
The company’s name will change to “Teraco: A Digital Realty Company.”
In a deal that valued Teraco at about $3.5 billion, Digital Realty bought the stake from a group of investors that included Berkshire Partners and Permira. With this deal, Digital Realty now has 4 markets on the African continent: Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Digital Realty says that the current and ongoing installation of new undersea cable networks that circle Africa has made these 4markets more important from a strategic point of view. When paired with Digital Realty’s facilities in Marseille, France, the business expects to provide a variety of key connectivity hubs to its customers in Africa.
According to A. William Stein, CEO of Digital Realty, the acquisition of Teraco provides the company with considerable regional scale as well as access to a superior, top-notch portfolio in Africa’s largest market, which would improve its capacity to meet the increased demand for connection among its client base in the region.
The level of competition in the data center industry is only expected to increase throughout the continent. During the past few weeks, TechCabal has reported on several other noteworthy developments in the sector. Among these are the launches of a hyper-scale data center in South Africa by Vantage Data Centres and the first carrier-neutral data center in Namibia, which Paratus Namibia has launched.
