Residents in communities already struggling with unreliable municipal services may end up carrying the environmental costs of South Africa’s data centre boom while the economic rewards flow elsewhere. That is the warning at the centre of submissions now before the South African Human Rights Commission, which is investigating the human rights implications of the country’s rapid expansion of digital infrastructure.
Johannesburg and Cape Town have become Africa’s leading destinations for data centres, facilities that support banking, government services, cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications. South Africa currently hosts about 55 such centres, with approximately 10 more planned across multiple cities. Billions of rand in investment from global technology companies are driving that growth. Yet the commission’s submissions reveal a sharp divide between those who see the expansion as essential to the nation’s economic future and those who warn it could strain resources already under pressure.
The Climate Justice Coalition, representing more than 80 civil society, labour and community organisations, put it plainly: “profit accumulation must not be prioritised over the human rights and dignity of people.” The coalition argues that as data centres expand globally in response to pressure on AI companies to demonstrate profitability, benefits flow to an elite few while host communities face the consequences. Electricity consumption for data centres is expected to double by 2030, or even triple for AI-focused facilities. Because data centres often do not pay the full cost of electricity, local residents absorb the burden of rising prices.
The African Centre for Biodiversity takes that concern further. These are large industrial facilities, the centre argues, whose footprint extends well beyond their buildings. They operate around the clock, require constant cooling to prevent servers from overheating, and place sustained pressure on electricity grids and water supplies while driving up land prices in the cities where they are established. The centre is calling for a rights-based governance framework that assesses not only the buildings themselves but the entire infrastructure chain, including renewable energy projects, power-purchase agreements, grid connections, water implications and e-waste streams.
By contrast, the Internet Service Providers’ Association, which represents internet and telecommunications companies, rejects what it calls misinformation about data centre impacts. ISPA argues these facilities are essential infrastructure for a modern economy and are not responsible for South Africa’s electricity constraints. The association says Eskom’s central problem is not excessive demand but declining electricity consumption caused by deindustrialisation and the rapid uptake of private solar generation. ISPA urges the commission to recognise data centres as anchor infrastructure for the digital economy and the future delivery of government services.
The association also cautions against importing concerns from markets such as the United States and Ireland without considering local circumstances. In the US, rapid AI data centre expansion has triggered significant community opposition over electricity consumption, water use and environmental effects, with surveys showing rising local resistance to new facilities.
The Association for Computing Machinery has staked out a middle position. It acknowledges that data centres are critical to South Africa’s digital transformation and economic growth, but raises concerns about the concentration of power among a small number of predominantly foreign-owned operators. The ACM questions whether publicly shared resources like electricity and water should effectively subsidise private infrastructure when some of the value generated flows offshore. Its proposed remedy is a “digital inclusion dividend” requiring major data centre projects to deliver measurable benefits to ordinary South Africans, including community networks, affordable connectivity programmes, skills development and access to computing capacity for universities and small businesses.
What remains unresolved is who decides. The Human Rights Commission’s investigation will have to weigh whether the communities closest to these facilities have any meaningful say over the trade-offs being made in their neighbourhoods, and whether the governance frameworks South Africa builds now will be adequate for the scale of infrastructure still to come.