Equinix, the U.S. data centre giant, just cleared a major hurdle in South Africa: Cape Town's municipal tribunal approved its proposal to build two data centres in the city's King Air Industria area, despite a coordinated fight from community and legal groups. The project would require roughly 170 megawatts of power capacity, making it one of the largest proposed data centre developments in the country.

To put that number in context: Teraco, Africa's largest data centre operator, runs about 189 megawatts of critical power capacity across all its campuses combined. Equinix is proposing to come close to matching that, in a single city.

The objection isn't to data centres. It's to the terms.

South African grassroots movement Housing Assembly and UK-based technology advocacy group Foxglove challenged the project during tribunal hearings, represented by the Legal Resources Centre. Their argument was specific: not enough information had been disclosed about how much water and electricity the facilities would consume, or what the environmental consequences would be.

Rosa Curling, co-executive director at Foxglove, put it sharply. "We have seen this playbook from U.S. Big Tech companies again and again: turn up in a community, tell them as little as possible about the huge harm the data centre will cause, and leave the people living there to pick up the pieces."

Both groups said they were assessing a potential appeal.

Equinix, for its part, confirmed it has purchased land in Cape Town but has not yet submitted a site development plan, the document under South Africa's planning system that sets out how an approved project will actually be operated and laid out. The company said it is "committed to being fully transparent" if it proceeds, and that it engages with local utilities and government leaders "early in the planning process."

Why this matters beyond Cape Town

Data centre demand across Africa is rising fast, driven by the same forces pushing it everywhere: cloud computing, streaming, artificial intelligence workloads that require enormous amounts of compute power running around the clock. For a country like South Africa, the pitch is straightforward: infrastructure investment, jobs, connectivity to the global digital economy.

But data centres are unusually hungry. They consume electricity continuously, at scale, and many require significant volumes of water to cool their server racks. In a city that has already lived through a near-catastrophic drought (Cape Town came within weeks of running out of municipal water in 2018), the question of how much water a 170-megawatt facility pulls from local systems is not abstract. It is the kind of question residents have a legitimate stake in answering before shovels go in the ground, not after.

That's the core of the activist argument, and the tribunal's approval does not resolve it. A site development plan still has to be filed and reviewed. An appeal is possible. And Equinix itself has not yet committed to proceeding.

What this approval does is set a precedent: Cape Town's planning system has said yes to the concept, even with the environmental disclosure questions unresolved. That decision will shape how future projects, by Equinix and others, get negotiated across South Africa and potentially across the continent.

The tension here is real and not going away. African cities need digital infrastructure. They also have limited water, strained electricity grids, and communities that have watched foreign investment arrive with big promises and complicated consequences. Getting the terms right from the start is easier than renegotiating them after 170 megawatts are already running.