Cape Town Tribunal Clears Two Giant Data Centres Near International Airport

The building of two massive data centres next to Cape Town International Airport has cleared its first regulatory hurdle after South Africa's Municipal Planning Tribunal approved a land use, subdivision and consolidation application covering more than 120,000 square metres in the city's Airport Industria area. The application was submitted by King David Country Club, which owns the site known as King Air Industria, and paves the way for two new facilities to be built by the US multinational Equinix, one of the world's largest data centre operators.

An Application Light on Water and Power Detail

The approved application makes no mention of how much water the two data centres will use, and does not detail energy supply and demand, backup diesel generation, fuel storage, air pollution or noise. That lack of detail formed the basis for opposition to the application from the Housing Assembly, a Cape Town-based social movement, and Foxglove, a UK-based tech justice non-profit that received advice from the Legal Resource Centre during the tribunal hearing.

The Math Behind a 174-Megawatt Facility

Presenting to the tribunal, Legal Resource Centre attorney Kimal Harvey said research shows that a data centre using traditional cooling techniques consumes about 25.5 million litres of water per year for every megawatt of electricity it needs. The proposed data centres at King Air Industria would have an electrical demand of about 174 megawatts, a figure that, applying the same ratio, equates to roughly 4.4 billion litres of water a year, in a metropolitan area that has experienced severe drought and strict water restrictions within the past decade. The scale of that demand is central to why opponents argued the tribunal needed more information before approving the project rather than after construction had already begun.

Part of a Wider Data Centre Build-Out Across Africa

The King Air Industria project adds Cape Town to a growing list of African cities attracting large-scale data centre investment, as cloud computing, streaming and artificial intelligence workloads push global operators to expand capacity closer to users on the continent. South Africa's existing digital infrastructure, subsea cable connectivity and relatively stable grid access in the Western Cape have made it an attractive location for hyperscale operators such as Equinix, even as questions about electricity and water availability in a water-stressed region remain unresolved. Equinix, listed on the Nasdaq exchange in the United States, already operates data centres across dozens of countries and has been expanding its African footprint in recent years alongside rivals chasing the continent's growing demand for cloud storage and computing capacity.

The tribunal's approval covers land use only and represents an early step rather than a final green light for construction. Environmental authorisation, electricity supply agreements and further municipal processes typically follow before ground is broken on projects of this scale in South Africa. Opponents of the King Air Industria application say they intend to keep pressing for fuller disclosure of water and energy figures at each subsequent stage of approval, arguing that once construction begins it becomes far harder for regulators or civil society groups to force operators to change a facility's design. For now, the case has become a test of how Cape Town balances its ambitions to attract large technology investment against the resource constraints of a metro area still shaped by memories of its 2018 near-miss with running out of municipal water.

Source: AllAfrica - Daily Maverick