NEW CASE: Foxglove and housing campaigners appeal against Cape Town hyperscale data centre after US Big Tech firm leaves huge gaps in critical planning information
Last month, campaigners from the Housing Assembly (HA) protested outside Cape Town’s Civic Centre against the harmful impact of new hyperscale data centres in South Africa.
The city of Cape Town’s Municipal Planning Tribunal was meeting to decide whether or not to approve an application by Big Tech company Equinix to build a 174 MVA hyperscale data centre at an industrial development called King Air Industria.
Legal counsel from Legal Resource Centre (LRC), representing HA and Foxglove, pointed out to the MPT that Equinix’s published plans to build the massive new data centre was full of holes – critical information gaps about its effect on the community and surrounding area.
As LRC said: “nothing about water, nothing about emissions, limited on electricity, nothing about diesel generators, nothing about air pollution, nothing about noise, and [with] no plans for the buildings themselves.”
Despite this, MPT members voted to grant permission for the data centre to be built. But it was not unanimous. MPT member Wally Johnstone, Lead Urban Planner at Macroplan, voted against, highlightingrecent community protests in Cape Town around access to electricity and warning that those objections “should not be ignored”.
We agree. That’s why, today, Foxglove and HA, with legal counsel LRC, have launched a legal challenge to stop this data centre being built unless and until those critical information gaps have been filled and the people of Cape Town have the detailed required to decide whether or not to consent to its construction.
This is Foxglove’s second data centre case, following our win in April with Global Action Plan, when we forced the UK Government to concede it made a “serious logical error” in plans to force through a new hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire, England, by failing to ensure measures designed to mitigate the environmental impact of the site were legally binding.
The name on the application in Buckinghamshire was Greystoke. In Cape Town it’s Equinix. But we all know the real reason, and culprit, behind the breakneck at-any-cost build out of data centres across the world unfolding around us: Big Tech’s trillion-dollar bet on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative (so-called) AI.
The same Big Tech companies Foxglove has been fighting for the last five years: Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, along with Gen AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, have bet the farm on LLMs representing a step change in the way everyone on Earth uses technology.
That may or may not ultimately prove to be accurate. You can read loud and passionate arguments for and against whether or not LLMs will live up to the hype.
What is not in doubt is that the data centres on which Generative AI depends need unbelievable amounts of power and (in some cases) water to function. Many single hyperscale data centres need as much water and power as a major city, and the huge increases in power generation required will cause gigantic amounts of new planet-heating carbon emissions, on the order of international airports, to be blasted into our air.
In response, a battle has begun around the world where communities and grassroots activists are coming together to demand that massive new data centres, build to provide compute for Big Tech LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, Copilot and Muse, are only built with the consent of the communities in which they are built.
That consent will only come if Big Tech companies can demonstrate communities will not pay the cost for their new facilities, whether in our environment, our wallets, our drinking water or our health.
We’re a long way from that – as we see in Cape Town, Equinix is refusing to provide even the most basic information about the data centre’s cost to the community. Without that information, it is impossible for people to consent.
Equinix is a US-based multinational data centre giant that operates more than 260 server farms in over 70 cities worldwide. This battle needs to be both international and coordinated or we will lose.
That is why Foxglove is proud to stand with Housing Assembly in Cape Town in our second case against this threat to our environment and to our efforts to combat the existential threat of climate disaster.
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