Geneva Policy Forum
As South Africa consolidates its position as Africa’s dominant data hub, a growing coalition of civil society organizations is demanding a pause on new data center construction until the full impact on the country’s scarce water, land, and electricity resources is independently investigated.
The call places South Africa at the centre of a global debate over the hidden costs of digital infrastructure — one that pits the promises of foreign investment and technological modernization against the realities of resource scarcity, environmental stewardship, and community rights.
A Booming Sector Under Scrutiny
US technology giants including Amazon, Microsoft, and Equinix have been steadily expanding their digital footprint in South Africa, drawn by the country’s reliable connectivity, strategic location, and government incentives. President Cyril Ramaphosa has actively courted this investment, noting that South Africa already hosts 70 percent of Africa’s data center capacity and identifying the sector as a key opportunity in the global digital economy.
The growth has been rapid. The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), the country’s official rights watchdog, has acknowledged « significant growth » in the establishment of data centers, cloud infrastructure, and related digital systems. In May, the commission issued a public call for input — and the response was overwhelming: over 250 submissions poured in from interested groups, signaling deep public concern about the pace and transparency of the expansion.
« 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, » said Dr. Eileen Carter, who leads the commission’s preliminary review process.
The Equinix Controversy in Cape Town
At the heart of the current debate is a recently approved Equinix hyperscale facility slated for construction in Cape Town — a city that narrowly averted a « Day Zero » crisis in 2018, when its reservoirs came perilously close to running dry due to severe drought.
The facility is estimated to require 160 megawatts of electricity to operate, a figure that has alarmed residents still haunted by the country’s recent experience with « loadshedding » — the rolling power cuts that crippled businesses and daily life for years. While South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, has reported a power surplus during the winter peak-demand season, civil society groups are wary of that surplus being redirected to feed energy-intensive data centers rather than benefiting households and local industry.
The juxtaposition is stark: in a city that almost ran out of water, and in a country that until recently couldn’t keep the lights on, billions are being poured into infrastructure whose primary beneficiaries are foreign technology companies and their global clients.
Transparency: The Missing Ingredient
Experts argue that the call for a temporary halt should not be misunderstood as a rejection of foreign investment. Rather, it is a demand for clear rules — especially around transparency — before the boom accelerates further.
« Serious investors are not deterred by clear rules. They price uncertainty, and an unregulated boom is the most uncertain environment of all, » said Pitso Tsibolane, a senior lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
A core problem, Tsibolane noted, is that operators are not required to disclose how much water, electricity, and land they will use or commit to in binding terms. As a result, every proposal is evaluated without the numbers — making informed public debate and meaningful regulatory oversight nearly impossible.
For civil society groups, the issue is not whether South Africa should host data centers, but whether the terms of their operation should be decided behind closed doors, with minimal public input and no enforceable commitments on resource consumption.
Industry Pushback
Data center operators have pushed back against the criticism, cautioning against drawing direct comparisons with large-scale facilities in the United States, where water, land, and power demands are significantly higher. They point out that Eskom currently has a power surplus and that an increasing number of South African data centers rely on renewable energy for their electricity needs.
« 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, » said Sasha Booth-Beharilal, chairperson of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), which represents tech companies operating data centers in the country.
Booth-Beharilal also emphasized that local data centers employ new technologies to minimize water usage, noting that consumption levels are « substantially lower than the global average. »
A Global Pattern, A Local reckoning
South Africa’s data center dilemma mirrors a global pattern. In the United States and elsewhere, the rapid proliferation of data centers — driven by the explosive growth of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and streaming services — has come under intensifying scrutiny for its environmental and societal impacts. Communities from Virginia to Ireland have raised concerns about water depletion, grid strain, and the displacement of local resources by energy-hungry server farms.
What sets the South African case apart is the involvement of the country’s official human rights watchdog, lending institutional weight to concerns that might otherwise be dismissed as NIMBYism. The SAHRC’s engagement signals that the data center debate is being framed not merely as an environmental or economic question, but as a matter of rights — the right of communities to water, to energy, and to a say in how their resources are allocated.
The Road Ahead
As the SAHRC works through the more than 250 submissions it has received, the pressure is on both government and industry to find a balance between competing imperatives: attracting the foreign investment that South Africa’s economy desperately needs, and ensuring that such investment does not come at the expense of the country’s already strained natural resources and the communities that depend on them.
The outcome of this process could set a precedent not only for South Africa but for other African nations watching closely — countries that may soon face similar questions as global tech companies look to expand their digital infrastructure across the continent.
For now, civil society groups have made their position clear: the boom must pause until the public knows what it is paying for.
Tags: South Africa, Data Centers, Human Rights, Energy Policy, Water Scarcity, Digital Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, Foreign Investment
References:
- South African Human Rights Commission — public call for submissions on data center impacts (May 2026): https://www.sahrc.org.za/
- University of Cape Town — Department of Information Systems, research commentary by Pitso Tsibolane: https://www.uct.ac.za/