A Cape Town housing group is asking for a national pause on hyperscale data centers

Housing Assembly and Foxglove say the two Equinix facilities proposed for Cape Town, 174 megawatts in total, would use more than 4.4 billion liters of water a year, as much as 18,000 homes ^[15]. That is about 25 million liters per megawatt per year, and about 244,000 liters for each of the 18,000 homes in their comparison ^[2][1]. An Equinix spokesperson told Rest of World that "Sustainable design is not an afterthought for us; it is a starting point" ^[18]. Equinix did not give Rest of World a per-site water figure.

McKinsey put African compute demand at up to 2.2 gigawatts by 2030, roughly five times current levels ^[4]. Five times implies about 440 megawatts on the continent today ^[3]. The two contested Cape Town buildings would be close to 40% of that ^[4].

Equinix plans to invest $438 million in South Africa ^[7]. Its market capitalization was $99.36 billion on September 16, up more than 30% since last December ^[14]. The South African plan is 0.44% of that ^[5]. A year of permit delay is a scheduling problem for a company that size. "Our members know what it is to queue for water, to go without electricity, and to wait decades for decent housing. Now a massive data center is trying to jump the queue and take our land, water and energy," Kashiefa Achmat, chairperson of Housing Assembly, said ^[17].

What has been filed and what has been granted are different things. The August challenge covers two proposed facilities ^[11]. The national moratorium is a request, made to the South African Human Rights Commission alongside a call for it to investigate the projects' impacts ^[12][2]. Elsewhere the same demand has already worked: New York imposed a statewide moratorium of up to a year on hyperscale data centers in June ^[9], and in Kenya a proposed 1-gigawatt project by G42 and Microsoft stalled in May, partly over concerns about its power needs ^[19]. G42 and Microsoft did not respond to Rest of World's request for comment ^[21].

Equinix is a wholesale operator, based in California, that provides facilities to hyperscalers and other clients ^[20]. The compute goes to customers who are somewhere else. The groups have also asked for rules requiring operators to disclose water and electricity use and deliver benefits to the surrounding community ^[13]. Rachel Adams of the Global Center on AI Governance told Rest of World that when communities only discover the impact after decisions are made, it can "create mistrust and play on the uneven power relationships between large tech providers and local communities" ^[22]. Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy and climate justice at Johns Hopkins University, told Rest of World that a lack of transparency around data centers is common among big tech companies ^[23].

Whether the objectors end up owning the numbers depends on whether the water or the power the site draws is already rationed for the people living next to it. Cape Town came close to running out of water in 2018 ^[16]. It depends too on whether the draw was published before the permit decision, or only after somebody sued for it. Where both answers go against the operator, the only figures in the record are 174 megawatts and 4.4 billion liters, sourced to Housing Assembly and Foxglove.