The City of Cape Town has paved the way for the construction of an Equinix hyperscaler data centre at King Air Industria (KAI) estate.
The city’s Municipal Planning Tribunal (MPT) has passed an application to rezone the estate from Mixed Use to General Industrial.
Opposition from the Housing Assembly and Foxglove had called for the application to be turned down and resubmitted with more information.
They argued that it didn’t provide details of issues important to the community, including water consumption, electricity demand, emissions, diesel generators and fuel storage, air pollution, cooling systems, and the design and scale of the proposed buildings.
The proposed data centre would be a 174MW facility that could consume as much as 4.,4-billion liters of water annually and enough electricity to power 130 000 homes.
The MPT has supported the initial rezoning, leaving environmental details to subsequent planning phases.