Cape Town Approved The Data Centres Before Requiring The Water Numbers

Cooling design, load and water sources are only disclosed at the next stage, after the zoning decision has already been made.

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Nobody in this story did anything wrong. The operator complied with what was asked. The city followed its procedure. Objectors raised the right question. The process still produced a decision about a scarce resource before anyone had established how much of it would be used, and that is a governance failure rather than a failure of conduct.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

The City of Cape Town has approved a zoning application by Equinix for two hyperscale data centres. The Housing Assembly and the UK-based organisation Foxglove oppose the development and have retained the Legal Resources Centre, which estimated consumption at 12.05 million litres a day, or 4.4 billion litres a year. That figure is wrong. It applied a per-megawatt water average meant for continuous information technology load to the maximum electrical load, and assumed evaporative cooling when Equinix has publicly confirmed dry-air systems that consume negligible operational water. Crucially, the company has yet to share precise details of the facility’s design, cooling type, critical load, expected continuous load and water sources, because that information is only required for the Site Development Plan, which must still go before the municipal planning tribunal.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

The sequence matters more than the estimate. Equinix’s own global head of masterplanning and sustainability has written that the choice of cooling technology during the initial design phase determines a facility’s water efficiency over its entire lifecycle, and that unlike energy efficiency there are few opportunities to improve water usage effectiveness once a facility is operational. Evaporative cooling consumes less energy and significantly more water, while air cooling consumes no water and significantly more energy, so operators must select technology suited to local conditions. A decision of that permanence, taken once and effectively irreversible, is being made on the far side of the approval that grants the right to build. Conditions attached before permission is granted are ordinary. Conditions imposed afterwards are litigation.

IMPLICATIONS

The context is not neutral. In February the South African Human Rights Commission, acting under section 13(1)(a)(i) of its founding Act, recommended that government declare the water crisis a national disaster under the Disaster Management Act, describing the situation as having reached crisis proportions and naming high levels of water losses beyond acceptable norms and insufficient planning for population growth among its drivers. Meanwhile Africa accounts for just one per cent of global data centres, Microsoft has spent R20.5 billion on facilities in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban with a further R5.5 billion planned, and financial journalist Rob Rose warns that large facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity and water in what he calls an absolutely water-scarce region.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

The remedy is unglamorous and cheap. Water disclosure should sit at the first approval gate rather than the second, meaning that any application to rezone land for a facility above a defined load must state its cooling technology, its projected water usage effectiveness, its water source and its behaviour under municipal restriction. None of that is difficult for an operator to provide, since the numbers are calculable at design stage and reported internationally under an established standard. What it changes is who holds the information at the moment the decision is taken. At one per cent of global capacity, South Africa still has the leverage to ask. That leverage declines with every approval granted without the question, and a country recommended for a national water disaster declaration should be spending it now rather than discovering later what it agreed to.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net