Mordor Intelligence estimates that South Africa has around 430MW of IT load in 2025, with anticipated growth to 964.4 MW by 2030. Demand is being driven, particularly with regards to edge datacentres, by an increased need for real-time processing.

The edge allows for companies to radically improve operations. Lott Chidawaya, senior sales manager: cloud, NTT DATA, says a practical example would be a manufacturing plant with a temperature sensor to notify decisionmakers in real-time. “There are a lot of IoT devices going into mining and manufacturing where people’s lives depend on the speed of this information, and edge computing means that decisions can be made at the source of data capture.”