The City of Cape Town is drafting new development guidelines for large data centre applications, its first public acknowledgement that the approvals process needs changing, and has confirmed that the rezoning it granted in July for a hyperscale precinct at King Air Industria is suspended and cannot be acted on.

Separately, Equinix, the US operator named throughout the project, has told TechCentral the site is a “long-term land bank”, that it has no immediate plans to develop it and that it has submitted no planning or development applications.

Asked whether the approval’s operation is suspended pending an appeal lodged by housing activists, Alderman Eddie Andrews, the city’s deputy mayor and mayoral committee member for spatial planning and environment, said: “Yes. Where an appeal is lodged, the approval remains suspended until the appeal has been finalised and a final decision has been made.”

The appeal report is “currently being finalised”, Andrews said, and will then go to the planning appeals authority, which he confirmed is executive mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis. “As the report has not yet been submitted to the planning appeals authority, it is not possible at this stage to provide a date for the appeal decision.”

Andrews declined to engage the merits, saying the city could not “pre-empt the decision” of the appeals authority. Asked whether Cape Town will require large data centre applications to disclose water and power figures, he said that fell outside the appeal’s scope, but that the city “is in the process of formulating refined development guidelines for large data centre applications”. What those guidelines will require, and whether they will apply to applications already in the system, is unconfirmed.

Equinix said it had completed the purchase of land in Cape Town and that the land “represents a long-term land bank”. The company “has no immediate plans to develop the site and has not submitted any planning or development applications”, a spokesman said.

King Air Industria land

Equinix engages “local authorities, communities, utilities and other stakeholders” before any planning or applications, and “any future development will be guided by their feedback through continued, transparent dialogue”, the spokesman said.

That is a fuller version of the position the company took in July, when it said that “should we decide to proceed with any development”, it was “committed to being fully transparent”.

Equinix’s stance does not dispose of the appeal, because what is under appeal is not a building but a change to what the land may lawfully be used for. Section 35(1) of the city’s planning by-law provides that “a use right vests in land and not in a person”, and section 35(4) binds a successor-in-title to conditions of approval. If the approval survives, the precinct carries data centre development rights – whoever ends up occupying it.

Who lodged the application has been reported inconsistently. The King Air Industria land belongs to the King David Golf Club, which has leased it to developers, and the rezoning has been attributed variously to the club, to Equinix and to a planning consultancy acting on Equinix’s behalf.

Equinix’s pledge to consult is also forward-looking, and the rezoning is not. It was decided on a record the tribunal’s own dissenting member said was too thin to assess. The rights it creates attach to the land whether or not Equinix ever builds.

In April, Equinix told TechCentral it had committed R7.5-billion to South African and African data centres and bought 327 000m² of land in Johannesburg and Cape Town for R890-million, with 172MW of capacity under construction and a further 160MW planned.

The Housing Assembly and UK non-profit Foxglove, represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), are appealing the municipal planning tribunal’s 14 July decision, which was taken 4-1. They say:

The tribunal approved the application without figures for water consumption or grid draw, without detail on diesel generators, emissions, air pollution or noise, and without plans for the buildings;
That those questions were unlawfully deferred to after approval; and
That the combined impact of the two facilities planned for the site, together covering about 120 000m², was never assessed. They also argue the tribunal wrongly treated the matter as a simple rezoning when its decision created a new “data centre” land use category.

“Our clients’ appeal contends that this assessment could not lawfully be made on the information before the tribunal,” said Sherylle Dass of the LRC in a statement this week.

The dissenting tribunal member, Macroplan lead urban planner Wally Johnstone, said the public “has a right to know how this approval will affect grid stability and access to electricity”.

Fight against data centres

The LRC, founded in 1979 by anti-apartheid lawyers, describes itself as South Africa’s largest public interest law centre. Foxglove is a UK-registered non-profit whose published funders include the Open Society Foundations, the Sigrid Rausing Trust and Luminate.

With the charity Global Action Plan, it brought the UK’s first legal challenge against a hyperscale data centre in 2025.

The British government conceded in January, admitting a “serious logical error”, but the developer fought on, and the case closed only in April when it accepted that environmental mitigation had to be made binding by contract with the council, the remedy the Cape Town appellants want. The Housing Assembly organises across more than 20 Western Cape communities. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media