As South Africa’s digital economy accelerates, traditional data centre infrastructure is increasingly seen as insufficient to meet the demands of AI growth, data sovereignty, and sustainability.
Local market data shows rapid infrastructure growth, but rising energy constraints and cooling challenges are forcing organisations to reconsider how they build and scale digital infrastructure.
Data centre design must evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA, new research commissioned by Lenovo reveals.
From powering AI workloads efficiently to meeting urgent sustainability and compliance demands, traditional data centre designs are falling short, with nearly half (46%) of IT leaders admitting their current infrastructure does not support energy or carbon-reduction goals.
At the same time, an overwhelming 99% of IT and C-level decision makers in the region say data sovereignty will be important, a sentiment that resonates deeply within our borders, driven by stringent regulatory frameworks like POPIA and how data is collected, stored and processed in the years ahead.
And, while AI continues to accelerate data usage across industries, many organisations are still struggling to implement the technology effectively or power it sustainably, highlighting the growing gap between digital ambition and infrastructure reality.
Dean Wolson, GM of Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo Southern Africa, explains that Lenovo undertook the Data Centre of the Future study in partnership with Opinium to provide a blueprint for the key factors influencing the future design, technology and location of data centres. It comes as the data centre market grows, and energy usage, sustainability and costs become critical considerations for IT decision makers in EMEA.
In SA, a surge in data centre demand
South Africa has become the leading data centre hub in Africa, driven by enterprise digital transformation, hyperscale cloud expansion, and sovereign data demand.
According to Mordor Intelligence, the data centre market is projected to grow from $0,58-billion in 2025 to $1,25-billion by 2030, at a CAGR of about 16,6%.
Johannesburg remains the dominant hub, while Cape Town and Durban attract growing investment.
The colocation segment alone was valued at $410-million in 2024 and is forecast to reach $843-million by 2030, reflecting strong demand from enterprises, hyperscalers, and digital services.
South Africa hosts approximately 69 operational data centre facilities with more planned, supporting services in finance, telco, cloud and AI.
These figures confirm that South Africa is the digital gateway for enterprise, cloud and AI services in sub-Saharan Africa, Wolson says.
Power and sustainability constrain future growth
He adds that one of South Africa’s most pressing structural challenges remains power reliability and sustainability, a factor deeply relevant to future data centre design.
The country’s electricity grid struggles with frequent outages and load shedding, pressing data centre operators to look beyond the national grid for a reliable power supply.
Large hyperscale and AI-ready data facilities can demand 20 MW to 100 MW or more, comparable to supplying power to tens of thousands of households, placing substantial pressure on an already tight grid.
Alternative energy initiatives are emerging, such as Africa Data Centres’ 12 MW solar farm project to power its Cape Town and Johannesburg operations, a sign that renewable generation will be central to future capacity.
Lenovo EMEA findings
Recent research commissioned by Lenovo and Opinium across EMEA, while not South Africa-specific, highlights several themes that resonate strongly with South Africa’s market realities.
In terms of the sustainability readiness gap, Lenovo’s findings show 92% of IT decision-makers expect partners to reduce energy and carbon footprint, yet only 46% feel their current data centre supports sustainability goals.
In South Africa, that gap is even more acute. With grid instability and an urgent push toward renewable power mandates, South African data centre operators must prioritise energy-efficient designs and renewable generation.
This aligns with the government’s National Policy on Cloud and Data, which encourages off-grid power solutions to alleviate pressure on the grid, according to Wolson.
When it comes to data sovereignty and latency, the Lenovo study notes 99% of EMEA IT leaders consider data sovereignty critical. In South Africa, Wolson points out that local hosting is a strategic necessity for compliance in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and public services.
Recent investments by Visa, aimed explicitly at reducing reliance on overseas infrastructure, underscore this dynamic for South Africa.
AI’s impact on data usage and readiness is crucial. Lenovo reports 90% of IT leaders expect AI to drive data volumes up significantly, but only 41% are confident in their readiness.
This reflects well in the country, where the AI data centre market is expected to swell amid skills programmes and cloud investments, yet infrastructure still grapples with energy and cooling bottlenecks., Wolson adds.
Market imperatives
Energy and cooling innovation has become essential for South Africa’s data centre future, as traditional air-cooled designs increasingly struggle to support high-density compute and AI workloads.
This is driving a shift toward liquid cooling, hybrid power systems and more energy-efficient architectures as key competitive differentiators, Wolson says.
At the same time, grid resilience remains a critical constraint, requiring data centre operators to innovate around national grid limitations through on-site renewables, microgrids and battery storage to maintain uptime and sustainability.
To support this transformation, skills development and infrastructure policy must align, with national and private-sector partnerships accelerating the upskilling of professionals in AI, cloud and infrastructure engineering to manage more complex, energy-intensive environments.
Finally, sovereign data and cloud compliance are accelerating local capacity build-out, as regulatory expectations around data residency, latency and security increasingly favour domestic infrastructure over offshore hosting, a trend highlighted in South Africa’s evolving cloud and data centre policy landscape.
Technologies like liquid cooling, renewable power generation, and intelligent energy optimisation, as highlighted in the Lenovo research, will now be essential components of future-ready infrastructure.