Cape Town suspends King Air data centre rezoning as activists appeal

Cape Town has confirmed that the rezoning it granted in July for a hyperscale data centre precinct at King Air Industria is suspended and cannot be acted on while an appeal against the decision is decided.

The city is also drafting new development guidelines for large data centre applications, its first public acknowledgement that the approvals process needs changing.

As TechCentral reported on 17 September, the confirmation came from Alderman Eddie Andrews, the city’s deputy mayor and mayoral committee member for spatial planning and environment. Asked whether the approval’s operation is suspended, Andrews said: “Yes. Where an appeal is lodged, the approval remains suspended until the appeal has been finalised and a final decision has been made.”

What is actually under appeal

The appeal was lodged by the Housing Assembly and the UK non-profit Foxglove, represented by the Legal Resources Centre. It targets the municipal planning tribunal’s 14 July decision, which was taken 4-1.

What sits suspended is not a building. It is 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 the conditions of approval. If the approval survives the appeal, the precinct carries data centre development rights whoever ends up occupying it.

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

Equinix, the US operator named throughout the project, has told TechCentral the site is a “long-term land bank”. The company said it has no immediate plans to develop the site and has not submitted any planning or development applications. It said any future development would be guided by feedback from local authorities, communities and utilities through “continued, transparent dialogue”.

That position does not dispose of the appeal, because the rights attach to the land rather than to the company. In April, Equinix said 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 grounds the appellants raise

The appellants 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. They argue 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 contend 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 Legal Resources Centre 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”.

Where the decision goes next

The appeal report is being finalised and will then go to the planning appeals authority, which Andrews confirmed is executive mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis. Because the report has not yet been submitted, the city says it cannot 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, Andrews 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.

The public has a right to know how this approval will affect grid stability and access to electricity.

For ordinary Capetonians the questions in this appeal are the same ones that shape household budgets and daily routine: how much electricity a large facility draws from a grid that is still recovering, how much water it uses in a city that has learned to count every litre, and what noise and emissions a diesel backup plant puts into a residential area. Data centres are a growth industry and a source of skilled jobs, and the city is drafting rules to govern them rather than turning them away. What is unresolved is whether the figures that would answer those questions should have been in front of the tribunal before it decided, or whether they can be settled afterwards.

The Legal Resources Centre, 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. In that case the British government conceded in January, admitting a “serious logical error”, but the developer fought on, and the matter 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.

Source: TechCentral, Cape Town to write new rules for big data centre applications