South African civil rights groups are calling for a halt to the construction of additional data centers in the country until the use of scarce water, land and electricity resources has been investigated. That demand lands squarely on the machinery of corporate expansion and state approval, where the people living with shortages are expected to absorb the costs while tech firms and officials talk up the global digital economy.
The South African Human Rights Commission said it had received more than 250 submissions from interested groups after it called for input in May this year. That flood of responses shows how many people are already pushing back against a boom that has been sold as progress from above, even as the basic resources underneath it remain contested.
Who Pays for the Boom
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country hosts 70% of Africa's data center capacity, and the government has identified that as an opportunity in the global digital economy, inviting more tech companies to build digital infrastructure in the country. That invitation comes from the top. The people asked to live with the consequences are not the ones setting the terms.
The commission said the country had experienced "significant growth" in the establishment of data centers, cloud infrastructure and related digital systems. Dr. Eileen Carter, who leads the commission preliminary process, said, "A key issue emerging from the process is precisely the availability, consistency and transparency of information relating to matters such as electricity and water demand, land use, infrastructure requirements, environmental impacts and impacts on surrounding communities."
That missing information is the whole game. Operators get to expand first, while everyone else is left to guess how much water, land and electricity the facilities will consume.
One of the latest municipal approvals that has irked various quarters is an Equinix hyperscale facility to be built in Cape Town, a city that avoided a so-called "Day Zero" in 2018, when its taps were predicted to run dry due to water scarcity. The memory of that near-collapse still hangs over the city. Now another giant facility is set to arrive, with the same old promise that growth will somehow sort itself out.
The country's recent memory of widespread power cuts, known as "loadshedding," has also raised concerns about the 160 megawatts of electricity estimated to be required to run the facility. South Africa's power utility, Eskom, reported a power surplus during the winter peak-demand season, but civil society groups are wary of the surplus power being sold to data centers. The surplus exists on paper. The fear is where it goes.
What the Operators Say
Pitso Tsibolane, a senior lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, said, "Serious investors are not deterred by clear rules. They price uncertainty, and an unregulated boom is the most uncertain environment of all." He said one of the major problems was that operators were not required to disclose how much water, electricity and land they would use or commit to in binding terms, so every proposal was weighed without the numbers.
That is the quiet violence of the arrangement: public resources are treated as inputs for private expansion, while the public is denied the figures needed to judge the deal. The apparatus calls that development.
Operators have cautioned against comparing data centers being built in South Africa to large-scale data centers in the U.S. because the water, land and power needs there are much higher. They said Eskom currently has a power surplus and that most data centers increasingly rely on renewable energy for electricity.
Sasha Booth-Beharilal, chairperson of the Internet Service Providers Association, said, "It should be clear that the growth in energy demand due to data centers is not contributing to electricity scarcity in South Africa and that this increasing demand is not a cause of rising electricity tariffs." She also said, "Local data centers apply new technologies to minimize their water usage, which is substantially lower than the global average."
The organization represents tech companies operating in the sector and operating data centers in the country. That detail matters. The sector speaks for itself, and it speaks in the language of reassurance while the questions about water, land and electricity remain unresolved.
The Questions Still Standing
The South African Human Rights Commission's process has already pulled in more than 250 submissions, and Dr. Eileen Carter said the central issue remains the availability, consistency and transparency of information on electricity and water demand, land use, infrastructure requirements, environmental impacts and impacts on surrounding communities. Those are not side issues. They are the bill.
Cape Town's brush with "Day Zero" in 2018 and the country's memory of "loadshedding" sit in the background of every new approval. Yet the push continues, backed by government enthusiasm for a global digital economy and by industry claims that the boom can be managed without worsening scarcity.
For the people living with the consequences, the numbers still aren't binding, the disclosures still aren't complete, and the approvals keep coming.