Birth of the cool

Teraco JB4

Every tech boom needs a villain, and it would seem that AI has found one made of concrete and server racks. In the US, Erin Brockovich has moved on from contaminated groundwater to a crowdsourced map of datacentres, built from thousands of resident complaints. In June, New York became the first US state to halt the construction of new hyperscale datacentres, with a moratorium that can run for up to a year. Cape Town joined the tide two months later when the Housing Assembly a nd U K nonprofit Foxglove filed a legal challenge against two Equinix facilities proposed for the city. The campaigners claim the 174MW development would use more than 4.4bn litres of water a year in a city that came close to running dry in 2018. It makes for a compelling story, because in parts of the US, the numbers back it up, and if Brockovich gets her sequel, Capetonians will watch it unfold.

South Africa’s datacentres, however, run on a grid with power to spare, use cooling designed for a water-scarce country and serve AI workloads that look nothing like the gigawatt training campuses being built in the US.