The King Air Test: Build It and They Will Come – Provided the Neighbours Agree

The construction of data centres have met with fierce resistance from residents of neighbouring communities, such as these in the US. Cape Town’s King Air rezoning has become a test of whether data centre developers must disclose their water, electricity, emissions and noise impacts before land-use rights are granted.

“If you build it, he will come.” In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s Iowa farmer hears a voice in his cornfield, ploughs under his only source of income and builds a baseball diamond. In the movie this is called faith. In any other context we would call it a cash-flow problem. The line has been misquoted for nearly four decades as “build it and they will come”, and that version has become the unofficial investment thesis of the AI data centre industry.

South Africa has bought into it with some enthusiasm. We host roughly 70% of the continent’s data centre capacity, every hyperscaler worth its logo has a local region, and Equinix alone has committed R7.5 billion to South Africa and the rest of Africa. Yet even the believers are hedging. Equinix is building out Johannesburg in careful phases and sitting on land it bought in Johannesburg and Cape Town until the demand shows up. Its Cape Town site is, in its own words, a “long-term land bank”. Which is investor for “we’ll see”.

We have watched this movie before, and it wasn’t filmed in Iowa. It was filmed in Gauteng, one mega-mall at a time. Very few of our malls were built for new shoppers; they were built to poach tenants and feet from the mall down the road. Much new data centre capacity runs on the same churn, as customers shuffle from older halls to shinier ones. To be fair, the AI demand is not a mirage: Equinix’s first Johannesburg facility filled well ahead of forecast. But the scale needed to justify the next wave remains more forecast than fact. Fittingly, Vantage’s Johannesburg campus sits in Waterfall City, a short stroll from the Mall of Africa.

Uncertain demand was always the first hurdle for our field of dreams. The second has now arrived in Cape Town, in the form of neighbours who would like to know how much water and electricity the new arrival intends to drink. A single rezoning on the edge of the airport industrial area has become the first real test of what a community is owed when a 100 MW-plus AI campus moves in. However it ends, every municipality in the country will be taking notes. So far, the process has the cart some distance ahead of the horse: rights first, facts later.

On July 14, Cape Town’s municipal planning tribunal voted 4-1 to rezone land at King Air Industria for a hyperscale data centre precinct. Equinix is the operator named throughout, and the approvals cover roughly 174MW across two facilities. That is a sizeable town’s worth of electricity, approved on the strength of no electricity figures at all.

The Housing Assembly and UK non-profit Foxglove, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, appealed on three rather reasonable grounds. The tribunal approved the rezoning without water or grid figures. It deferred diesel generators, emissions and noise to a later date, presumably a sunnier one. And nobody assessed the combined impact of two facilities covering about 120 000m², or roughly 17 rugby fields.

The city has confirmed the approval is suspended until Executive Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, as planning appeals authority, decides the appeal. There is no date yet. Equinix, meanwhile, says it has no immediate plans to build and has submitted no planning applications. So we can all relax, then? Not quite. That is precisely the problem.

Cape Town’s planning by-law is clear: a use right vests in the land, not in the applicant. If the approval survives, the precinct carries data centre rights for whoever ends up owning it. Equinix’s promise to consult the community before building is no doubt sincere. It is also about as binding on the next owner as a note stuck to the fridge.

That makes King Air a template in three ways. It effectively creates a new “data centre” land-use category while being processed as a routine rezoning. It tests whether water and power disclosures can lawfully be deferred until after the rights are handed out. And it sets the evidentiary bar, which the tribunal’s lone dissenter, planner Wally Johnstone, felt was set too low. The public, he said, has a right to know how the approval affects grid stability and access to electricity. A radical position, apparently.

The City has since conceded the point, in the way cities do. Deputy Mayor Eddie Andrews confirmed Cape Town is drafting refined guidelines for large data centre applications. What they will require, and whether they will apply to applications already in the system, is anyone’s guess. Whatever Cape Town writes, the other metros will copy, typos included.

Demonstrators outside Cape Town Civic Centre calling for more information to be shared with communities about the constrution of data centres in their areas. Cape Town’s King Air rezoning has become a test of whether data centre developers must disclose their water, electricity, emissions and noise impacts before land-use rights are granted.

If it is any comfort, Cape Town is simply catching up with the rest of the world. In the US, Data Center Watch counted 75 contested projects worth around $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and a June Heatmap poll found at least 70% of Americans would rather not have one next door. The grievances will be familiar to anyone who has opened a South African municipal bill: higher power prices, thirsty cooling, generators that never sleep, generous tax breaks, few permanent jobs and deals signed behind NDAs.

The UK offers the closer parallel. Foxglove, with Global Action Plan, brought Britain’s first legal challenge against a hyperscale data centre in 2025. The government conceded in January, admitting a “serious logical error”, a phrase every civil servant hopes never to sign. The developer held out until April, when it accepted that environmental mitigation had to be made binding by contract with the council. That is exactly what the Cape Town appellants are asking for. The playbook has been field-tested, and it works.

Nationally, the response is moving at the pace we have come to expect. The South African Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into the data centre industry has drawn about 275 written submissions. It has made no findings of violations. It has, however, identified prima facie systemic human rights concerns and significant evidentiary gaps, and has sent detailed follow-up questions to submitters.

In reply to a Parliamentary question, the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies laid out government’s position. The National Data and Cloud Policy 2024 provides investor certainty. The dtic does incentives. Skills and transformation flow largely through Equity Equivalent Investment Programmes. And investors should give municipalities short, medium and long-term water and electricity forecasts, plus their plans to offset that demand. That last bit is exactly right.

The same reply, however, confirms the minister has engaged the Minister of Electricity and Energy, and has had no engagements at all with the Department of Water and Sanitation. In the city that came within weeks of Day Zero in 2018, water is the one conversation national government has not started. It is also the only one Capetonians actually want to have. You couldn’t script it.

None of this is an argument against data centres. South Africa needs local AI compute for sovereignty, latency and jobs, and much of the industry already builds responsibly, with closed-loop and dry cooling that sips rather than gulps. The problem is that nobody has to prove it before the rights are granted. “Trust us” is not a planning condition.

A workable rulebook needs three things, none of them revolutionary. Disclosure before approval: binding water, power, generator and noise figures on the record. Cumulative assessment: judge the precinct, not each building as if it lives alone. And enforceable conditions: mitigation written into the approval or a contract, so it survives a change of owner.

That protects communities and gives serious investors the certainty the Data and Cloud Policy promised. Cape Town has a rare chance to write the rules once, instead of every metro relitigating them on its own. So build it, by all means. They may well come. Just put the horse back in front of the cart first.

* Paul Colmer is an executive member of the Wireless Access Providers Association.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL or National Media Group.