Altron and Teraco Join Forces to Launch Africa’s First Operational AI Data Center in South Africa

In October 2025, Altron officially launched its Artificial Intelligence (#AI) Factory from the Teraco data center in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town facility was expanded to a total of 50 MW capacity specifically to accommodate hyperscale computing and extreme cooling needed for AI.

Teraco selected Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPU), Hewlett Packard enterprise servers, and other ASUS hardware. Reportedly, Altron is offering access to more than 800 pre-curated AI models targeted at enterprises.

Although the data center is significantly smaller than the gigawatt-scale infrastructure of tech giants, it is deemed to be of sufficient size for local needs, where data localization and sovereignty are a must.

“The AI Factory will serve as a launchpad for local innovation, empowering developers, startups, and enterprises to design AI solutions tailored to South Africa’s unique linguistic, cultural, and infrastructure contexts… We’re not choosing between global technology excellence and local context, we’re combining both.”

Altron CTO Andy Mabaso

The data center will not only deliver low-power inference, but can be used for high-power training. For instance, it is suited for the Lelapa AI project, which seeks to train large language models (LLM) for South African local languages and contexts.