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South Africa has become the centre of Africa’s data economy, hosting about 70 per cent of the continent’s data centre capacity. Now civil society groups are asking whether the country is expanding too quickly without enough public information about how much electricity, water and land these facilities will consume.
South Africa has spent years positioning itself as the continent’s most important digital infrastructure market.
That strategy is beginning to pay off.
Amazon, Microsoft, Equinix and other major technology companies have expanded their presence in the country, while Johannesburg and Cape Town have become key locations for cloud computing, internet exchange and data storage.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said South Africa now hosts about 70 per cent of Africa’s data centre capacity. That gives the country a commanding position in a sector that is becoming increasingly important as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital services expand across the continent.
But the rapid growth is beginning to raise a difficult question.
How much water, electricity and land should South Africa commit to powering the digital economy?
A coalition of civil society organisations has called for a temporary pause on new data centre approvals while the South African Human Rights Commission investigates the sector’s environmental, social and human rights implications.
The commission says it has received more than 250 submissions since it called for public input earlier this year.
Among the groups pushing for greater scrutiny are the Housing Assembly, Foxglove, Open Secrets, Research + Action and the Planetary AI Collective.
Their argument is not that South Africa should reject investment in data centres.
Their concern is that the expansion is moving ahead faster than the systems regulating it.
The groups say there is no single regulator that has a full picture of the electricity, water and land requirements of the sector, and that operators are not required to publicly disclose facility level consumption in a consistent way.
That is the issue at the centre of the debate.
A data centre is a physical facility filled with servers and networking equipment that store, process and move digital information.
Every time people stream video, use cloud software, run artificial intelligence systems or access online services, some of that activity depends on data centres.
The buildings require significant amounts of electricity to run their computing equipment.
They also require cooling.
Depending on the technology being used, cooling can involve substantial amounts of water.
As demand for artificial intelligence grows, data centres are becoming larger and more energy intensive. McKinsey estimates that global data centre investment could approach $7 trillion by 2030, with much of that spending linked to the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
South Africa wants a share of that investment.
The question is what it will cost.
One of the most closely watched disputes involves proposed hyperscale data centre developments in Cape Town.
Civil society groups have raised concerns about projects associated with Equinix, one of the world’s largest data centre operators.
Campaigners estimate that two proposed facilities could require around 160 to 174 megawatts of electricity.
That level of electricity demand has attracted attention in a country that only recently emerged from years of severe load shedding.
Cape Town has also experienced its own water crisis.
In 2018, the city came close to what became known as Day Zero, when authorities warned that municipal taps could run dry because of prolonged drought.
The memory of that crisis has made questions about water use particularly sensitive.
Civil society organisations say that if conventional evaporative cooling systems were used at the proposed Cape Town facilities, annual water consumption could reach billions of litres.
One estimate in a submission to the Human Rights Commission put potential use at more than 4.4 billion litres a year.
That figure is based on an assumption about the cooling technology that would be used, so it should not be treated as confirmed future consumption.
But it explains why campaigners are asking for more disclosure before large projects are approved.
Data centre operators and industry representatives are pushing back.
They argue that the sector is increasingly using renewable energy and more efficient cooling systems.
They also say that South Africa currently has more electricity available than it did during the worst years of load shedding.
Eskom reported a power surplus during the recent winter peak period and has sharply reduced rolling blackouts.
Industry representatives say it is therefore wrong to suggest that data centres are creating South Africa’s current electricity problems.
The Internet Service Providers Association has also argued that local facilities are using technology that significantly reduces water consumption compared with older international data centre models.
That argument matters.
The issue is not settled.
South Africa may have enough power today to support more data infrastructure.
It may also be possible to build large data centres that use far less water than critics fear.
But the civil society case is that the public should not have to rely on assurances.
The numbers should be available.
The debate is not only about environmental impact.
It is also about economics.
Data centres create investment, construction work, technology jobs, tax revenue and digital infrastructure.
They can also make a country more attractive to global technology companies.
But they place demands on power networks, water systems, land and transmission infrastructure.
That raises a simple question.
Who pays for those systems?
If a private data centre requires new electricity transmission, new substations, new roads or additional water infrastructure, should those costs be carried by the operator or spread across the wider public?
This is already becoming a major issue elsewhere.
In the United States, disputes are growing over whether ordinary electricity customers should contribute to infrastructure upgrades required by large data centres.
South Africa now has the opportunity to settle those questions before the industry becomes much larger.
There is a tendency to speak about artificial intelligence as if it exists somewhere in the air.
It does not.
AI requires servers.
Servers require buildings.
Buildings require electricity.
Cooling systems may require water.
The cloud has a physical address.
For Africa, this matters.
Countries across the continent want to participate in the artificial intelligence economy, but very little of the infrastructure that powers that economy is currently located in Africa.
South Africa is the exception.
That creates an opportunity for the country.
It also gives it a responsibility to decide what kind of digital infrastructure model it wants to build.
Civil society groups are not asking the government to abandon data centre investment.
Their strongest argument is that the rules should come before the boom becomes too large to manage.
South Africa already has more than 60 known data centres with disclosed combined capacity of about 500 megawatts, according to the civil society submission to the Human Rights Commission.
Planned hyperscale developments could more than triple that capacity.
That is why transparency matters now.
Operators should be able to state clearly how much electricity they require.
They should disclose how much water they expect to use.
The public should know what infrastructure the state is expected to provide.
Communities should understand what benefits they will receive.
And regulators should be able to assess the total impact of several projects together rather than approving each one in isolation.
This does not make South Africa hostile to technology investment.
It makes the investment environment more predictable.
South Africa is ahead of the rest of the continent in data centre development.
That means the debate happening there now may soon appear elsewhere.
Nigeria wants more cloud infrastructure.
Kenya is attracting major technology companies.
Ghana is expanding its digital economy.
Egypt, Morocco and other African markets are positioning themselves for more data centre investment.
Every one of these countries will eventually face the same question.
How much electricity, water and public infrastructure should be committed to the digital economy, and what should citizens receive in return?
There is no reason Africa should reject the AI boom.
The continent should want the investment.
It should want the infrastructure.
It should want the jobs.
It should want more of its data stored closer to home.
But Africa should also decide the terms.
South Africa has an opportunity to do that before the rest of the continent follows.
The argument is therefore not about choosing between technology and water, or between data centres and electricity.
It is about making sure that one does not come at the unreasonable expense of the other.
Africa needs the digital economy.
It also needs the resources that make ordinary life possible.
The challenge is to build both.
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