Publishing Date: 19/03/2021
Raxio breaks ground on data centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Raxio Group has begun construction of its data centre at the ICT Park in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The pan-African data centre developer and operator announced the country’s first private carrier neutral colocation facility built to Uptime’s Tier III specifications in October 2020. The company expects construction to be complete by the end of 2021.
UK firm Future-tech has been appointed as the lead consultant, with Yema Architecture working as the local architect to manage design localisation, permitting, and construction supervision. The facility will initially accommodate an IT-capacity of 1.5MW with the possibility of expanding to 3MW as demand grows.
Though data centres in the continent have doubled since 2016, resources are tightly concentrated in South Africa, which has some two-thirds of capacity. A recent report from The African Data Centres Association (ADCA) and Xalam Analytics claimed Africa needs 1,000MW and 700 facilities to meet growing demand and bring the rest of the continent onto level terms with the capacity and density of South Africa.
NTT plans $2 billion data centre investment in India, aims to double data capacity
NTT has announced plans to invest heavily in its Indian data centre business over the next three years, including $400 million on solar projects.
The company aims to have 2.5 million sq ft (232,000 sq m) of capacity in the next three years, and will spend $2 billion in the country over the same timeframe on data centres, networks, and solar projects.
The company plans to double down on its data centre business in the country. The company aims to expand from its current footprint of 1.5 million sq ft (139,000 sq m) across 10 data centres in four cities to 2.5 million sq ft (232,000 sq m), and enter four more cities.
The company plans to have six more data centre parks over the next three years. Three parks are under construction in Mahape, Airoli (both Navi Mumbai), and Chandivali in Mumbai, with more planned in Chennai, Delhi, and Bengaluru.
Investment will include $400 million to scale up green power generation capacity from 150MW to 250MW, as well as $100 million for building new undersea cable landing ports in Chennai, Mumbai and Khandala in Gujarat.
IBM opens multizone cloud region in Brazil
IBM has opened a multizone region for its cloud services in Brazil, fulfilling a promise made back in 2019.
In 2019, IBM had one data centre in São Paulo, Brazil, and promised it would extend it to a multizone region in 2020 to offer customers reliable web services. The work got delayed somewhat due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the region finally went live this year, with two new data centres, also in São Paulo, but on three separate sites.
Having three independent data centres means that a failure in one site will only affect that zone, and workloads that are duplicated will be protected.
IBM now has eight MZRs around the world, having recently opened new ones in Osaka and Toronto, alongside existing ones in the US (Dallas and Washington), Europe (London and Frankfurt), Japan, and Australia.
Facebook announces 10th and 11th data centres at Prineville, Oregon campus
Facebook has announced it is expanding its Prineville data centre campus again, the latest expansion will add a further 900,000 square feet (83,600 sq m) with two new buildings of 450,000 sq ft (41,800 sq m) each, with servers planned to be on two separate floors. Development is due to finish in 2023.
This latest expansion takes the total to 11 buildings and 4.6 million square feet. In development for over 10 years, it is Facebook’s largest data centre campus in the US, and has seen the social media giant invest more than $2 billion into the site.
The Prineville Data Centre is supported by 100 percent renewable energy, including two solar projects located in Oregon.
