Article One and the Centre for Human Rights have asked the Human Rights Commission to recommend a pause on huge new projects
As the South African Human Rights Commission investigates the human rights impacts of data centres, Tyronne McCrindle argues that South Africa should welcome this infrastructure, but only if there is transparency, participation and benefit sharing.
Last Thursday, Article One and the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, filed a joint submission with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which had called for submissions on data centres and human rights.
The SAHRC inquiry comes at the right time as South Africa gears up for a significant increase in data centre capacity. It is estimated that existing data centres in the country draw between 3MW and 70MW of electricity, but new facilities being planned are of a different magnitude: a 360MW campus in Cape Town, a 200MW campus north of Johannesburg, and expansion plans for new data centres that could more than double the sector's national power demand.
Follow us on WhatsApp | LinkedIn for the latest headlines
With the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies, Big Tech corporations are spending trillions on AI infrastructure. Anxieties about the impact of AI and how it will transform society abound and many oppose the development of data centres. We do not.
We believe data centres can be rights-enabling infrastructure. Digital information hosted on South African soil is subject to South African law: to the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), the Information Regulator, and our courts. This matters. The Information Regulator is already enmeshed in a legal struggle with Google and Meta, who claim South African law does not apply to them even as they process the private data of millions of people living in South Africa.
Local hosting capacity is part of how we make our constitutional right to privacy enforceable in practice, how we lower the cost of connectivity, and how South Africa and Africa participate in the digital economy on our own terms rather than as a data colony of the big tech corporations and the Global North.
But these benefits are not automatic. And the costs of getting this wrong will not fall on the companies building these facilities. They will fall on ordinary South Africans.
Data centres can consume vast quantities of the two public resources already in short supply in South Africa: electricity and water. In Cape Town, four planned facilities alone could demand the equivalent of a third of the city's current electricity supply.
When journalists asked Eskom how much electricity existing data centres consume, Eskom refused to disclose the figures, citing privacy protections of POPIA. Municipalities were similarly evasive. Data centres that draw on public electricity and water systems are being approved and operated while the public is denied the most basic information about what they consume.
South Africa has bitter experience of what happens when the promised benefits of large-scale development fail to reach the communities that host it.
Hyperscale data centres employ relatively few people once built. If their approvals are not tied to real, enforceable community benefit agreements (local employment and skills, community connectivity, contributions to the municipal services they depend on) we will repeat the oldest pattern in our economy: profound wealth generated on the doorstep of communities that see none of it.
Other countries are responding to this rapid data centre development. Last month, New York became the first US state to impose a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres, while the state builds a proper environmental review framework. In Ireland, where data centres came to consume more than a fifth of the national electricity supply, new facilities must bring their own generation and storage, meet renewable energy requirements, and support the grid. In Chile, an environmental court forced Google to redesign a data centre around air cooling after it failed to assess the impact on Santiago's aquifer.
This is what we have asked the Commission to recommend for South Africa: a time-bound pause on approvals of new large-scale data centres until a proper framework is in place.
That framework must guarantee four things: mandatory public disclosure of every large facility's electricity and water consumption; a requirement that large new loads should bring new renewable generation and storage to the system rather than consuming existing constrained supply; meaningful public participation, backed by enforceable community benefit agreements; and human rights due diligence from the multinational corporations involved, who should not offer South Africans a lower standard than European law already demands of them at home.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
A pause on development is not a rejection. It is how a democracy catches its breath before committing scarce public resources for decades.
South Africa is early enough in its data centre development to learn from other countries' mistakes. The question is not whether South Africa should host data centres; it is on what terms, under whose oversight, and for whose benefit.
Tyronne McCrindle is the Executive Director of Article One, a public benefit organisation working to build a culture of participatory governance in South Africa by holding government, corporations and powerful interests accountable.
Views expressed are not necessarily those of GroundUp.
