Inside Cape Town’s deal turning golf fairways into a giant data hub - Daily Maverick

Every industrial revolution is bad for the environment in some way, but they do bring benefits. The great data centre buildout is just the factories of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In 1956, the King David Golf Club was established to give the growing Jewish community in what is now Greater Tygerberg (read: Parow and Bellville) a place to swing their clubs and stretch their legs.

The thing about golf courses is that they’re incredibly thirsty, slurping up to three million litres of water per day. That is enough to support the needs of 60,000 individuals under the Level 6B water restrictions (read: 50 litres per person, per day) at the height of Cape Town’s Day Zero fears – 120,000 if the Mother City ticked over to the dreaded Level 7.

That is enough to support the needs of 60,000 individuals under the Level 6B water restrictions (50 litres per person, per day) at the height of Cape Town’s Day Zero fears — 120,000 individuals if the Mother City ticked over to the dreaded Level 7.

You can use any maths you want, but data centres — even in the US, and those monster AI complexes are thirsty — do not guzzle as much of the essential H2O as the luscious fairways, which do not pay their fair share of taxes, nor do they contribute to GDP at the same level.

This doesn’t completely absolve Equinix and the City of Cape Town of blame for the intricate square dance they did when unlocking the former golf course grounds for the current industrial revolution, but we can give them a break on some of the environmental fronts.

When the King David club’s membership collapsed in the mid-2010s, it wound up operations and signed a 99-year land lease with Atterbury Property and Old Mutual Properties. The developers commenced a R3-billion redevelopment to transform the former fairways into a world-class logistics gateway, capitalising on its 2km proximity to Cape Town International Airport’s freight terminal.

Under Case ID 1500156580, the developer, Planning Partners, on behalf of the global digital infrastructure firm Equinix, applied to the Municipal Planning Tribunal (MPT) for land-use rights to establish their second hyperscale data centre within Phase 4 of the park.

On 14 July, the MPT approved the application by a 4:1 majority, overriding a formal, joint objection from the Housing Assembly and the UK-based non-profit Foxglove, legally represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC).

The real tea, however, is in the details of the commercial deal between the City of Cape Town, the developer (Atterbury/Old Mutual), and Equinix. It is an elegantly executed multilayered transaction that ties land-use rezoning directly to municipal grid infrastructure.

To ease the regulatory path, the developer relied on an administrative interpretation that classified the data centre as a warehouse.

Since the original July 2019 approval, KAI has undergone at least seven rounds of planning and condition amendments.

Each amendment (whether increasing total bulk by 3,000m² in 2021, reallocating GLA, or extending phasing timelines) was presented individually as a “minor technical adjustment”. The cumulative result is a fundamental transformation: Equinix’s two data centres will consume nearly half (122,545m²) of the entire park’s approved GLA.

By dragging out approvals step-by-step over seven years, the developer dodged a full assessment of the project’s cumulative impact on local resources and the community.

However, a 160MVA data centre requires industrial backup generation, as per the 99.9999999% uptime guarantee needed to secure the data centre contract.

Under National Environmental Management Act Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations (Listing Notice 2, Activity 2), any non-renewable electricity generation facility of 10MW or more requires a full, national Scoping and Environmental Impact Assessment. The developer bypassed providing these details at the planning level, creating a risk that land-use rights may be granted for a facility lacking environmental authorisation.

So, while the water-use argument was easy to dance around, the legal challenge brought by the Housing Assembly, Foxglove and the LRC is justified. It exposes a systemic governance gap: the City’s willingness to grant valuable, long-term land-use rights to a colossally resource-intensive hyperscale development while kicking the critical environmental and resource-consumption assessments to a non-public, administrative stage. DM