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Johannesburg has had its grid back for more than 500 days. Eskom's count on 2 October stood at 504 consecutive days without load shedding since 16 May 2025. The operators who built through the outages have not changed their designs. Teraco, South Africa's largest colocation operator, drew 399 GWh in 2025, three times its 2021 draw. It is still building a 120 MW solar plant it will own outright.
On 8 October, outside Casablanca, a 20 MW AI data centre was announced with its power named first. The supply is renewable, from TAQA Morocco. Africa's operators made their own power the founding assumption of a data centre. The design has outlived the crisis that produced it. The question is who else now builds the same way.
Eskom passed 500 days without load shedding and Teraco still builds its own 120 MW
Teraco is majority-owned by Digital Realty. Its Free State plant is rated at 120 MW and 354 GWh a year. The power is wheeled across Eskom's grid to its halls in Ekurhuleni and Cape Town. Teraco calls owning the plant a world first for a data centre operator. Its chief executive, Jan Hnizdo, called the investment "an industry imperative" as AI lifts power demand.
Teraco's sustainability report, read by TechCentral on 2 September, moves completion to the first quarter of 2027. Renewables met 14 per cent of its consumption in 2025. These operators built around absent power, not cheap power. A grid that works is now one supplier among several.
Africa runs 360 MW live and power has overtaken fibre as the binding constraint
The continent's trade body, the African Actors of Data Center Association (ADCA), published its 2026 economic report in February. Active capacity is 360 MW, with 238 MW under construction and 656 MW planned. That is 0.6 per cent of global capacity. Its reading is plain: "Power availability has overtaken connectivity as the principal constraint."
Around 600 million people in Africa still live without electricity, by the International Energy Agency's count. The Microsoft and G42 plan at Olkaria in Kenya, a £752m ($1bn, €880m) letter of intent, stalled this year. President Ruto put it plainly to grassroots leaders in Nairobi. "To switch on that one data center, we would need to shut off power for half the country." Semafor puts the need at about a third of Kenya's roughly 3,000 MW.
Kasi built Lagos with a 132 kV grid line and three power sources behind it
Kasi Cloud Datacenters commissioned LOS1 on its Lekki campus on 19 May 2026. The campus is designed to scale to about 100 MW of critical IT capacity. Its power is hybrid gas, solar and battery storage with N+1 redundancy. Beside them runs a direct 132 kV connection to the Transmission Company of Nigeria. The design targets a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.6 or better, aligned to the TIA-942 standard.
Six subsea cables land next door, Equiano and 2Africa among them. Johnson Agogbua, Kasi's founder and chief executive, put the purpose in one line. "For too long, Africa's data has powered someone else's economy." The grid is one of four supplies, and the facility runs if any one fails.
Raxio runs Tier III sites in six countries with a seventh building and six times last year's contracts
Raxio Group operates in Uganda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Côte d'Ivoire and Angola. Tanzania is soon to be operational. Every facility is Uptime Institute Tier III certified. In July the company reported committed capital above £286m ($380m, €334m). Its contracts in the first half of 2026 carried six times the power of the same period in 2025.
The World Bank's International Finance Corporation backed the build with a £75m ($100m, €88m) debt package in April 2025. Robert Skjødt, Raxio's chief executive, named the drivers: "rapid digital adoption, cloud migration and the emergence of significant AI workloads." Eight Teraco sites, seven Raxio sites and two Kasi Cloud sites are on our open Atlas.
2Africa's 21 African landings pull compute onshore and the power has to be there first
The core of the 2Africa cable was completed in November 2025. It runs 45,000 km, carries up to 180 Tbit/s and lands 21 times in 16 African countries. Fibre of that scale makes onshore compute viable.
Morocco shows the sequence. Nexus Core Systems is building an AI factory outside Casablanca inside a £902m ($1.2bn, €1.06bn) project. FiveNines Group leads design management of its first 20 MW data centre. It comes in phases of 16 MW and 20 MW through 2027. Among the continent's AI factories / data centres it is the newest, and its power came first.
Google Cloud's July summit put its Johannesburg region at £68.1bn ($90.6bn, €79.7bn) of added output and 314,900 jobs by 2030. The demand side is no longer speculative.
Ireland now requires every large data centre to match its grid draw with its own generation
On 12 December 2025 Ireland's regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), decided the rule. Data centres at or above 10 MVA face one condition. They "are required to provide dispatchable onsite or proximate generation and/or storage capacity which matches their MIC". MIC is the maximum import capacity, the draw the connection allows. A connection cannot energise, or ramp to its full MIC, until that generation is delivered. At least 80 per cent of annual demand must come from additional renewable electricity generated in Ireland, within six years.
The United States buys the same design by the hundred megawatts. On 5 October Wärtsilä took an order for a 282 MW onsite power plant for a US data centre. It runs on 15 engines, delivered in 2028 and operating in 2029. The company has sold more than 3 GW for US data centres. US gas capacity in development nearly tripled to 252 GW in 2025, as we showed in August. More than a third of it is for data centres on site.
What Lagos and Johannesburg built from necessity, Dublin now requires and Texas orders by choice.
Does your next build carry its own generation from day one?
Three design rules travel and the engineer still chooses the mix
First, size the generation to the load, not to the outage. Teraco's 120 MW plant is set against an average draw of roughly 46 MW in 2025, with growth to come.
Second, treat the grid as one supplier among several. Kasi's 132 kV line sits beside gas, solar and batteries.
Third, site on power before latency. Casablanca named its power before its racks. Kenya's stalled campus shows the cost of the reverse order. The electrical engineer and the operator still choose the mix for each site. The single line diagram is theirs.
The generation line moves from contingency to core capital
For investors the change is in the budget, not the brochure. Generation now sits inside the project cost, not in a contingency row. In Ireland a connection cannot energise until its generation is delivered.
The immediate priority is to read every data centre pro forma for the plant behind the megawatt. A model that prices the connection without the generation understates both the capital and the schedule. An engine order placed this month runs in 2029.
The bottom line
Johannesburg's grid came back and the designs stayed. Africa's operators learnt to carry their own power because the alternative was waiting. Ireland now writes the same rule into its connection policy. The United States orders it by the hundred megawatts. A playbook written from necessity is being adopted by choice.
Next week: Cape Town ran out of water in 2018. Its data centres remember.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
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“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.