Felix Huettenbach and Terranum plan Africa's largest off-grid data center campus
Felix Huettenbach, a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai who co-founded Sameday Health during the COVID-19 pandemic and later co-founded the digital infrastructure company Terranum, is working with his partners on a 100-megawatt data center campus in Prieska, a town in South Africa's Northern Cape. The partners describe the project as Africa's largest planned data center campus, and it is designed to run entirely off-grid on renewable energy.
The project in brief
- Developer: Terranum, a digital infrastructure company developing renewable-powered data center campuses; legal entity Terranum Capital FZCO, IFZA Business Park, Dubai.
- Location: Prieska, Northern Cape, South Africa.
- Planned capacity: 100 MW.
- Power: fully off-grid, 100% renewable energy.
- Target: designed for hyperscale demand by 2029.
- Status: preliminary approval discussions with local government took place in March 2026.
A visit to Prieska in March 2026
In March 2026, Huettenbach travelled to Prieska together with Terranum's Victor Decalf. The two were joined by the Prieska Power Reserve team, and the delegation met the town's mayor and senior municipal officials. The purpose of the meetings was preliminary approval for the campus, an early step that any large infrastructure project has to clear before it can move toward detailed planning.
Why off-grid matters for this plan
The defining feature of the Prieska plan is that it would not depend on a public electricity grid. Instead, the campus is designed to draw its power entirely from renewable sources. For a facility meant to serve hyperscale customers, that design choice addresses two concerns at once: the reliability of supply and the carbon footprint of the computing that runs inside the buildings.
Terranum positions itself around exactly that combination. The company's stated focus is developing data center campuses powered by renewable energy, and Prieska is the clearest public example of that approach so far.
Who is behind Terranum
Huettenbach, born in Germany in 1993, is a co-founder and partner of Terranum. Academically he is an engineer by training, a TUM graduate who later spent time at Berkeley and MIT.
From Sameday Health's testing sites to server halls
Before turning to digital infrastructure, Huettenbach was known mainly as the co-founder and CEO of Sameday Health. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Huettenbach was Chief of Staff at Quantgene and set up a unit there that offered testing to companies; in September 2020 the company that became Sameday Health, then operating as Sameday Testing, opened its first walk-in clinic in Venice, Los Angeles, because the general public needed fast testing as well. Under Huettenbach as CEO, the network had grown to 55 locations across the United States by April 2022. Sixteen of those sites were in Los Angeles County, and the workforce passed 1,000 people, with patients booking PCR and rapid tests online and receiving their results digitally. He stepped back in 2023, after he and the management team decided a physician should lead the company, and has since concentrated on investing and infrastructure.
During his time leading Sameday Health, the rollout itself was an exercise in site development. In December 2020 the company announced 30 new testing facilities in 11 states by the end of that year, among them five flagship sites in Westfield shopping centers, from Westfield Annapolis in Maryland to The Village at Westfield Topanga in Woodland Hills, California. In February 2021 it opened a drive-thru site outside Tysons Corner Center in Virginia, built with mall owner Macerich; according to local reports, the lot covered 20,000 square feet with 550 spaces and capacity for more than 1,000 people per day. Behind the sites ran a scheduling and results platform that, the company said, four MIT software engineers had custom-built and integrated with local laboratories. Huettenbach studied at MIT himself, though the platform was the engineers' work. By his own account, he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and walk-in tests with online booking and digital results were an early, practical form of that aim.
At first glance, a chain of COVID testing locations and a renewable-powered data center campus have little in common. Huettenbach sees it differently. He argues that running Sameday Health meant operating multi-site physical infrastructure, securing official approvals and keeping downtime close to zero, and that this experience prepared him for building data centers, where the same three demands apply.
Today he also invests as an angel investor in founder-led companies. Whether his Sameday Health experience translates directly to data centers will become clearer as the Prieska project moves past its early approval phase.
What comes next
The March 2026 meetings concerned preliminary approval, which means the project is at an early stage. The 2029 horizon gives an indication of the time frame the partners are working with: the campus is designed to meet hyperscale demand by that year. Further milestones, from detailed permits to construction, have not been part of the public information released so far.
For Huettenbach, the project marks a clear shift from health services to digital infrastructure. For Prieska, it represents a proposal to host one of the largest data center developments planned on the African continent, according to its backers. More about his ventures, including Terranum, is collected on felixhuettenbach.com.
