The building of two massive water-hungry and energy-hungry data centres next to Cape Town International Airport has cleared the first regulatory hurdle.

An application that paves the way for two new data centres totalling more than 120,000 square metres in Cape Town's Airport Industria area has been approved by the Municipal Planning Tribunal.

The land use, subdivision and consolidation application by King David Country Club, which owns the area known as King Air Industria, neither makes mention of how much water the giant data centres will use, nor does it detail energy supply and demand.

The lack of information on this, and on backup diesel generation, fuel storage, air pollution, noise and related health impacts, formed the basis for opposition to the application by the Housing Assembly, a Cape Town-based social movement, and the UK-based tech justice non-profit organisation Foxglove, which received advice from the Legal Resource Centre.

Presenting to the tribunal on Tuesday, Legal Resource Centre attorney Kimal Harvey said their research revealed that for every 1MW of electricity needed, a data centre using traditional cooling techniques consumes about 25.5 million litres of water per year. The proposed data centres at King Air Industria, to be built by the US multinational company Equinix, would have an electrical demand of about 174MW -- which equates to about 4.4 billion litres...