Threat to South African data centres that will cost billions to fix

South African data centres face a major hurdle in Eskom’s continued failure to ensure energy security, which could ultimately be an existential threat to these essential computing facilities.

Data centres require significant amounts of energy to run the IT equipment housed inside and the cooling infrastructure used to prevent overheating.

With the increased usage of artificial intelligence, the computing power necessary to run AI models requires even more energy.

This is constantly on the minds of AI titans like the US and China, with many looking to nuclear power as a sustainable energy source.

However, in their case, the question is whether the energy supply can keep up with their demand. In the South African case, it is whether the energy supplied will stay consistent.

To ensure maximum uptime, all data centres are built with redundancy for everything, usually N+1, meaning there is a backup source should the facility experience a power outage.

On a tour of its JB3 data centre, Teraco told MyBroadband that it relies on 33 Mitsubishi V16 engines, each producing 1.5MW.

Teraco noted that the building’s roof was covered in solar panels. However, this rooftop solar installation only produces about 1MW of power for JB3.

Between the generators and solar, JB3 has enough redundancy for the data centre’s 30MW IT load and cooling systems.

A report by Mordor Intelligence found that South African data centres have a combined IT load of 501MW, almost 70MW more than in 2024.

The IT infrastructure in a data centre is constantly accessed through the Internet, requiring it to run 24/7. Therefore, the country’s data centres consume around 24 GWh daily with cooling factored in.

To put this into perspective, various energy companies in South Africa estimate the daily household consumption to be between 7kWh and 15kWh per day.

If an average of 11kWh of daily consumption is used, the energy consumed by the country’s data centres is equivalent to that of over 2 million households.

Data centres investing billions

While South Africa’s data centre market is rapidly expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 14%, according to Mordor, Eskom is struggling to ensure energy security.

Eskom recovered from its worst year of load-shedding in the 2023/24 financial year, going nearly a year without power outages.

However, the blackouts returned in early 2025 due to several generating facilities failing to return to operation on time, decreasing capacity.

Eskom chairperson Mteto Nyati noted during the power utility‘s State of the System and Winter Outlook that its recent shortfalls could be attributed to “people-related problems.”

As a result, Eskom was still struggling to control its maintenance slippages, most recently reporting that 15,137MW of capacity was out of service due to breakdowns at power stations.

While the government has been considering renewable energy as an alternative to its coal-dominated energy mix, South Africa does not have the distribution infrastructure to facilitate this.

Therefore, Teraco recently announced a 200MW utility-scale solar programme, for which it has set aside R3 billion in capex in the next five years.

This programme includes the construction of a 120MW solar plant in the Free State, which secured capacity on Eskom’s network to transport energy across the country.

Even with this investment and the addition of its 90MW facility currently under construction, Teraco’s total energy draw will be over 270MW, meaning it will need to continue relying on Eskom.

Another major data centre provider — Africa Data Centres — recently began constructing a 12MW solar power plant in the Free State to power its Cape Town data centre.

The Amazon Web Services data centre in Cape Town has also sourced some of its electricity from a 10MW solar plant in the Northern Cape since 2021.

However, Eskom’s energy insecurity threatens potential foreign investment in South Africa’s cloud and data centre industry.

A study by University of Oxford researchers recently revealed that South Africa is ranked among the top 13 countries globally by the number of AI data centres.

South Africa has four of these facilities, the only ones in Africa, all of which were built by foreign data centre operators.