Commercial · Planning

Cape Town, South Africa  |  30 July 2026  |  Property News Africa

Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal has approved the land-use application that clears the way for two hyperscale data centres beside Cape Town International Airport — a campus that objectors say carries an electrical demand of about 174 MVA, placing it among the largest data centre developments yet proposed in South Africa. The approval was granted on 14 July subject to conditions, and was reported internationally by Reuters this week.

The application did not quantify how much water the facilities would consume, nor did it set out energy supply and demand, according to reporting by GroundUp and the Daily Maverick. That omission is now the centre of a possible appeal — and for property investors across the continent, it is the clearest signal yet that the binding constraint on Africa’s fastest-growing asset class is not capital or construction. It is entitlement.

What the tribunal actually approved

The applicant was not the data centre operator. It was the landowner: King David Country Club, which owns the industrial precinct known as King Air Industria. The application covered three erven — two already zoned General Industry, one Mixed Use — and sought to place all three under General Industry to give Equinix the zoning uniformity it required, to consolidate them into a single plot, and to amend a condition imposed in 2019 that capped floor space on the site at 300,000 square metres. A small land swap with the City involving a substation formed part of the package.

The two proposed facilities would together exceed 120,000 square metres of floor space. Equinix, the US-listed operator behind them, has confirmed it purchased the land but has not yet submitted a site development plan, and has stated it did not itself lodge the planning applications attached to the site. The company says it will provide detailed information to stakeholders should it decide to proceed.

On scale: Reuters puts the required capacity at roughly 170MW, noting that Teraco — Africa’s largest data centre operator — has said it holds about 189MW of critical power capacity across all of its campuses combined. Objectors and the City record refer to a 174 MVA facility. The two units are not interchangeable, and Property News Africa has attributed each figure to its source rather than merging them.

The objections: water, power and a missing plan

The application was opposed by the Housing Assembly, a Cape Town social movement representing more than 20 Western Cape communities, and Foxglove, a UK-based technology justice organisation, with legal representation from the Legal Resources Centre. Their case was not that digital infrastructure has no place in South Africa. It was that the tribunal was asked to decide without the information a decision of this size requires.

The publicly available application, they argued, contained no adequate detail on water consumption, electricity demand, emissions, backup diesel generation, fuel storage, air pollution, cooling systems or the scale and design of the buildings. LRC attorney Kimal Harvey told the tribunal that, on the organisation’s own research into cooling water requirements per megawatt, a facility of this size would consume in the order of 4.4 billion litres of water a year, and that the electricity involved could power roughly 130,000 homes. Those figures are objector estimates presented in argument — they are not applicant disclosures and they are not official City numbers.

Location sharpens the objection. The site sits on the route to Cape Town International Airport, adjacent to St Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, with the Gugulethu communities of Barcelona and KTC across the N2 — households that, as the LRC put it, have lived through both load-shedding and water scarcity. Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling accused large US technology firms of disclosing as little as possible to the communities that absorb the impact.

Where the legal risk sits now

The City of Cape Town has confirmed that the tribunal’s approval was granted subject to conditions and that objectors have the right to appeal. Harvey has told Business Day and Moneyweb that the strongest ground would be that the tribunal failed to comply with the City’s own by-laws — that it treated a hyperscale facility as a routine rezoning and amendment of land-use rights, and unlawfully deferred infrastructure and spatial planning questions to later stages of the process. He also argues public participation was inadequate, because earlier consultations on the site’s land-use rights never contemplated a hyperscale data centre.

Procedurally, an appeal would be served on the applicant for comment before going to the City’s Appeal Authority, whose ruling becomes the City’s final decision. Even if no appeal is lodged, the development still faces a second gate: a site development plan addressing technical infrastructure, which must be supported by all relevant City departments before it is finalised. In other words, the 14 July decision opened the door. It did not settle the questions.

Project snapshot

A framework gap, not a Cape Town problem

The deeper issue is structural. South Africa has no dedicated legal framework for hyperscale developments, which leaves municipal planning tribunals to assess facilities of this magnitude using instruments designed for ordinary industrial rezonings — a point made to Moneyweb by Garreth Elston, a property investment professional at Golden Section. When the by-laws do not distinguish between a micro data centre and a 174 MVA campus, the two arrive at the tribunal through the same door.

The scale of what is coming makes that gap expensive. The Legal Resources Centre notes that in the 2026 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said 55 data centres had already been built in South Africa, with more than R50 billion in digital infrastructure investment expected over the following three years. Similar disputes over power, water and disclosure are already familiar in the United States and Europe. Nairobi, Lagos, Accra and Johannesburg are next in line — and none of them has a tested hyperscale planning regime either.

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