Accolades have been trailing the recent acquisition of Teraco Data Environments by Digital Realty an American real estate investment trust that invests in carrier-neutral data centers and provides colocation and peering services.

The latest accolade is coming from Engr. Ikechukwu Nnamani, Chief Executive Officer of Medallion Data Centre Limited, who expressed his excitement on the announcement that Digital Realty has acquired controlling stake in Africa’s largest datacenter operator, Teraco Data Environments of South Africa, in a transaction that valued Teraco’s datacenter assets at $3.5bn. This represents the biggest datacenter transaction in the continent.

Teraco is the largest and most densely interconnected data center 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 currently 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 in October 2021 the Austin Texas, USA based Digital Realty also announced the acquisition of the datacenter assets of Medallion Communications Limited in Nigeria. That marked the first time a global pure real estate investment trust (REIT) will be entering the country and beats 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 datacenter assets in the continent.

The Medallion Datacenter is the number 1 peering and connectivity datacenter in Nigeria and Teraco represents the same in South Africa, two of the largest economies in the continent.

The combination of Teraco’s leading position in South Africa with Digital Realty’s leading connectivity hubs in Nigeria on the west and Kenya on the east 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 the ability to serve local as well as multinational enterprises and service providers.

When reached for comment on the development, Engr. Nnamani stated the investment into Teraco by Digital Realty is a further testament that Digital Realty is fully commitment to grow the digital economy in not only Nigeria and the West African sub-region but also the whole of Africa.

This he stated will lead to significant foreign direct investment into the economy, boosting the GDP of the African countries, creating employment, and improving the quality of the lives of the citizens in the areas of education, healthcare, e-commerce, entertainment, security, governance, and agriculture amongst others. With the digitization of the economy and implementation of Internet of Things services, datacenters are essential to support these emerging services.

Digital Realty is the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centers, colocation and interconnection solutions. Digital Realty supports the world’s leading enterprises and service providers by delivering the full spectrum of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions.

PlatformDIGITAL, the company’s global data centre platform, provides customers a trusted foundation and proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx™) solution methodology for scaling digital business and efficiently managing data gravity challenges.

Digital Realty’s global data center footprint gives customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with more than 280 facilities in 48 metros across 24 countries on six continents.

Medallion’s Lagos data center is the leading connectivity hub in Western Africa with approximately 70 carriers and internet service providers, over 80 percent of the public peering traffic of the Nigerian Internet Exchange takes place at the carrier neutral datacenter.

Medallion offers access to all the exiting sub marine cables in Nigeria and additional subsea cables scheduled to be in operation in Lagos by 2023 are all expected to use Medallion as a peering point for content and bandwidth distribution.