Giant data centres get the first green light from Cape Town tribunal

An application that paves the way for two new data centres totalling more than 120 000m² in Cape Town’s airport industrial area has been approved by the Municipal Planning Tribunal.

The land use, subdivision and consolidation application by King David Country Club, which owns the area known as King Air Industria, makes no mention of how much water the giant data centres will use, nor does it detail energy supply and demand.

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The lack of information on this, and on backup diesel generation, fuel storage, air pollution, noise and related health impacts formed the basis for opposition to the application by Cape Town-based social movement, Housing Assembly, and UK-based tech justice non-profit organisation Foxglove, which received advice from the Legal Resource Centre (LRC).

Presenting to the tribunal on Tuesday, LRC attorney Kimal Harvey said their research revealed that for every megawatt (MW) of electricity needed, a data centre using traditional cooling techniques used about 25.5 million litres of water per year.

The proposed data centres at King Air Industria, to be built by American multinational company Equinix, would have an electrical demand of about 174MW. This equated to about 4.4 billion litres of water per year.

This amount of electricity could power about 130 000 homes.

The lack of this information in the land use application was a “critical” gap, stated Foxglove in its press release, and was “particularly troubling”.

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Harvey said Housing Assembly had pointed out that Cape Town had suffered serious historic problems with water scarcity, “with their members literally watching taps run dry during the ‘Day Zero’ crisis in the previous decade”.

“The failure of Equinix to provide any kind of substantive detail on the new data centre’s water consumption in [its] land use application not only renders it impossible for it to be properly considered by the City of Cape Town, but is also arguably a serious insult to everyone who has suffered through this water scarcity in the recent past.”

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The application by King David Country Club involves three erven, two of which are zoned as General Industry, and one as Mixed Use.

The landowner sought to have all three zoned as General Industry in order to have the zoning uniformity required by Equinix. The application also sought to consolidate the three erven into one, and amend the condition of approval granted in 2019 restricting floor space to less than 300 000m².

A small land swap with the city, involving a substation, is also part of the application.

Harvey argued the application was mischaracterised as “only a technical change” to the land use rights.

He said a data centre was defined within the Municipal Planning Amendment By-law as “a building or dedicated space within a building or a group of buildings used to store computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunication and storage systems”. But this definition was only created in the amendment in 2025, before the original application.

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“Therefore, the inclusion of data centres in the definitions for business premises and warehouses cannot be retrospectively applied”, and a new application was necessary, he argued.

The mischaracterisation also existed in the applicant’s minimisation of the impact a data centre has on the surrounding areas and communities, which related to its electricity and water usage.

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Tribunal member Wally Johnstone agreed that the current definition for a data centre was “wholly inadequate” and “simplistic”, and there was no recognition that there was a significant change to the use of the land.

Johnstone said Cape Town’s water systems were under pressure, and noted a recent march in Khayelitsha over lack of access to water.

“The concern is real and should not be ignored.”

He said the lack of greenhouse gas emission figures was also a concern, particularly given the impact of global heating on Cape Town’s water future, and high electricity use was a concern given recent load shedding and the impact on grid stability.

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“I’m obliged to conclude most of us don’t know what is required in terms of water and electricity demand in an application we’re asked to approve,” he said, adding that the lack of information meant he was unable to support the application.

However, the other four Tribunal members, including chair Sydney Holden, were of the view that details on water and electricity demand, along with other concerns, would be addressed in the Site Development Plan, which would still need to be approved.

They were in general agreement with the applicant that this was merely a technical amendment to the land use rights.

In granting the application, Holden said a data centre would promote the city “as a global, competitive, and innovation-driven hub”, create downstream employment and contribute to “improved digital infrastructure” serving a variety of industries.

He said the site development plan would have to be closely scrutinised, as well as the building plan, should the site development plan be approved.

© 2026 GroundUp. This article was first published here.

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