AINEWS
A planning tribunal greenlit 120,000 square metres of compute near the airport, deferring the water, energy, and pollution numbers to a later municipal planning document — the Site Development Plan — that the public has not seen.
Cape Town's planning tribunal approved two data centres covering more than 120,000 square metres near Cape Town International Airport last month. The land use application never opened the file on how much fresh water the buildings will need each day, what power source will keep them running, or what the diesel generators will burn when the grid drops. Those numbers sit inside a Site Development Plan, the municipal planning document that follows a land use approval and is supposed to translate a project into its resource, traffic, and pollution footprint. The Site Development Plan has not been published.
The Cape Town Municipal Planning Tribunal greenlit the application on the King David Country Club's former fairways on 14 July, according to GroundUp and Daily Maverick. The combined power demand is more than 170MW. The land use application did not include the data centres' projected water use, energy supply and demand, backup diesel generation, fuel storage, air pollution, or noise impact. The site today hosts a golf course that draws up to three million litres of water a day, roughly the water needs of 60,000 individuals under the 2018 'Day Zero' Level 6B restrictions, according to Daily Maverick's reporting on the deal.
Day Zero is the shorthand Capetonians use for the 2018 municipal water crisis, when reservoir levels fell so low that the city warned residents their household taps could be cut off. The near-miss reshaped how the city plans for drought, and it is the local memory any data-centre water debate has to clear. South Africa is one of the world's most water-stressed countries, and Cape Town sits inside a watershed that has run short before. A BusinessDay opinion column by Sõzarn Barday on 7 August put the policy question in plain terms: medium-size AI data centres have projected water demands of up to three million litres per day, and the country has not decided who carries that load (BusinessDay).
The three-million-litre number is a class figure, not a project commitment. The two applicants have not put a daily water demand on the record. That is the disclosure gap the public now has a window to close. The Cape Town process separates the land use question from the Site Development Plan: the tribunal decides whether the use fits, the Site Development Plan decides how the building runs. Water, power, diesel, and noise all land in the second document, drafted after the land use approval. That is the moment the city can require specific cooling technology, a water budget, or a different site.
The cooling menu is real, not theoretical. Evaporative cooling, the default for cheap land and warm climates, trades fresh water for heat rejection. Closed-loop systems recycle the same water through the building with minimal top-up. Dry cooling uses air instead of water, at an energy penalty that varies with outside temperature. Co-location with heavy industry that already produces waste heat, or siting outside the Day-Zero watershed, are the two siting options. None of these is on the table yet, because the Site Development Plan is the document that would carry the choice.
The opposition at the tribunal was led by the Housing Assembly and the UK-based tech-justice non-profit Foxglove, advised by the Legal Resource Centre. LRC attorney Kimal Harvey argued that for every 1MW a traditional-cooling data centre needs, a defined water load follows. The argument did not stop the land use approval; it set up the Site Development Plan as the next venue (Daily Maverick).
A proposed hyperscale facility near Cape Town International Airport sits in the same approval queue, and other large data-centre proposals are advancing in and around the city. The procedural pattern is the same in each case: land use goes first, water and power come later. That order is a policy choice, not an inevitability. A city that wanted to weigh the water cost before granting approval could require a water budget at the land use stage, the way it already requires a traffic impact statement.
The Site Development Plan is the lever. Until the city's planning office publishes it, residents and the operators' future neighbours have no number to argue with and no cooling technology to demand. The next approval gate belongs to whoever drafts and signs that plan, and it is the moment the Day Zero memory either shapes the answer or gets left out of it.