San Francisco’s Digital Realty to purchase majority stake in S. Africa’s Teraco

• Financial

Digital Realty Trust, Inc., the San Francisco, California-headquartered real estate investment trust mostly focused on carrier-neutral data centres, said in a statement on Monday that it would purchase a majority stake in Johannesburg-based Teraco in a deal what could value the S.

African cloud data centre provider at around $3.5 billion, as the Californian data centre provider having had a revenue of $4.3 billion as of Q3, 2021, seemed to be having a strong yen to expand internationally with a pandemic-associated remote-working cohort still scaling higher.

If truth is told, latest Digital Realty move to branch out its footprints into the African continent came against the backdrop of a sweeping acceleration in a shift towards cloud computing alongside online ecosystem, eventually spurring up demands for data centres that usually harbour physical servers to store and process clients’ data online.

On top of that, as data centre operators turned to a germane to a global-scale transformation to remote-working ecosystem since onset of the pandemic outbreak, Texas-based data centre start-up Cyrus One alongside Kansas’ QTS Realty Trust also had rubberstamped multi-billion dollar deals last year in a bid to cash in on the two-year long boom.

Digital Realty to purchase S. Africa’s Teraco

According to financial terms of the deal, the US-based data centre operator that has over 280 regional servers across the globe would purchase a 55 per cent stake in Teraco from a consortium of heavy-weight investors like of Berkshire Partners alongside Permira among others.

Meanwhile, addressing to a through and through optimism over the accord, Digital Realty head William Stein was quoted saying “…deal would add regional scale with a network-dense portfolio in South Africa's most strategically important metros. ”