The City of Cape Town has approved five data centres, with two more under assessment, and has declined to name the operators or disclose their combined power and water demand, citing privacy, according to a report published on 4 September1. The city's municipal planning tribunal consents these applications, and water availability is the constraint the objections turn on.
Nobody outside the city can add the five together, and a cumulative total is the calculation that decides whether a water-constrained city can carry them. The Legal Resources Centre, a public-interest law organisation that objected to two Equinix facilities before the tribunal, puts the water draw of those two sites at about 4.4 billion litres a year if conventional evaporative cooling is used. A separate assessment by Dr Chantelle van Staden puts their annual electricity consumption at roughly 1.4 to 1.5 billion kWh, which the same report compares to the use of a quarter of a million average Cape Town households2.
Neither figure comes from the city or from Equinix, and both rest on a cooling assumption the operator has not confirmed. The electricity estimate is derived from an approved 174 MVA supply, and megavolt-amperes rate a connection rather than measure energy. Turning one into the other needs a power factor and assumed running hours, neither of which has been published, so the number cannot be checked by a reader who wants to.
Operators elsewhere have answered the resource question in public and invited exactly that checking. ZDATA said in July that treated wastewater supplies its Johor facility outright, a claim precise enough for anyone to check. In Cape Town no appeal has been confirmed as filed. The Legal Resources Centre's own case page still ends at its 13 July pre-hearing statement, which predates the tribunal's approval and records the organisation's position as a demand for full water and power disclosure before any decision, rather than a formal ground of appeal3.
