No need for panic over planned data centres in Cape Town, says Water and Sanitation Department

Activists outside Cape Town Civic Centre raising awareness about the need for more information on the construction of data centres in communities.

The Department of Water and Sanitation said that while there’s no need to panic over plans for data centres in Cape Town, the municipality must inform its residents that the data centres will be paying for their water usage.

Concerns and questions have been raised after the City of Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal (MPT) supported an application for the rezoning of a hyperscale data centre development at King Air Industria.

The application paves the way for two new data centres totalling more than 120,000 square metres.

According to reports, the land use, subdivision, and consolidation application by King David Country Club, which owns the area known as King Air Industria, neither makes mention of how much water the giant data centres will use, nor does it detail energy supply and demand.