Well, that was quick. Vantage Data Centers announced at the end of July that it had completed its first facility in Johannesburg in just under 10 months. The building, with its gleaming exhaust pipes pointing to the sky, can now be seen over the highway from the Mall of Africa in Midrand’s Waterfall precinct; when it’s running, it will deliver 16MW of IT load. The Denver, Colorado- headquartered company has also bought two sites next door, and once it’s built datacentres on these, all three will together deliver 80MW.

Vantage’s stratospheric growth has mirrored that of the hyperscalers in the last decade and it now has a total of 26 campuses across the globe. The hyperscalers also seem to really like the company, and as Antoine Boniface, the EMEA president, told me recently, it derives 95% of its revenue from its ‘big customers’. By big customers he means the very largest enterprise customers, and the hyperscalers. It’s in this last category, he says, that five or six customers represent more than 85% of its revenue.