28 www. refrigerationandaircon. co. za RACA Journal I October 2026
Data centres
DATA CENTRE FEATURE SERIES
MYTH VERSUS REALITY: HOW MUCH WATER DO DATA CENTRES REALLY USE?
By Eamonn Ryan
At the Pan African Data Centre Conference 2026, several speakers poked fun at the popular environmental caricature of data centres: the idea that cooling amounts to little more than constantly running municipal water through a hose over the kit and walking away satisfied.
Africa currently hosts less than 1 % of global data centre capacity, around 0.6 %, and an even smaller share of AI training facilities. By contrast, the US alone accounts for roughly 45 % of global capacity. Whatever pressure data centres are placing on global freshwater reserves, only a tiny fraction of it is happening on the African continent today.
Africa is in the rare position of being able to anticipate tomorrow’ s pressure before the build‐out truly begins. The real question is not whether data centres consume water – they do – but whether Africa can design a model where digital growth and water resilience develop together rather than compete.
This was the topic of conversation at a panel discussion. One of the more grounded interventions came from environmental lawyer Carlyn Lewis, consultant: natural resources and environment, ENS. Her assessment was blunt: for the facilities built to date, actual water consumption has been“ very minimal”.
“ Most modern sites use closed‐loop cooling systems. They take an initial charge of municipal water, then circulate and recirculate it, losing relatively little in operation compared to public fears. The image of data centres‘ drinking’ the city dry simply doesn’ t line up with current engineering practice in many locations,” she said.
So why the moral panic? Partly, it’ s scale. In the US and Europe, the size and speed of AI‐driven deployments are unprecedented. Where communities are already angry about noise, land use or energy, water becomes an easy, emotive hook for media coverage, especially in water‐stressed regions. That narrative then travels, often without context, and lands in countries like South Africa, where it doesn’ t quite fit.
The more useful framing emerging from the session was this: the problem is less the data centre itself and more the fragile, leaky, under‐maintained infrastructure that surrounds it. In some South African cities, you see more water spilling from a single broken mains and potholed roads than you ever would from a data centre cooling loop. This doesn’ t absolve operators of responsibility, but it does shift the conversation from simplistic blame to systemic thinking.
LAW ON THE BOOKS VERSUS LAW ON THE GROUND Where does Africa, especially South Africa, stand out is in its regulatory architecture?
South Africa already has:
• Robust environmental legislation, much of it modelled on international best practice but adapted to local conditions.
• The King IV corporate governance code, pushing large companies to report on sustainability, environmental impact and stakeholder engagement.
• Mandatory public participation procedures for developments with environmental impact, backed by case law where projects have been halted for failing to consult communities.
• An Advertising Regulatory Board working on standards for environmental claims, to curb‘ greenwashing’ by forcing companies to prove what they say about water and sustainability.
Carlyn Lewis, consultant: natural
• A constitutional right to resources and environment, ENS. water, including a guaranteed minimum allocation per person per day.
Layered on top of this, the South African Human Rights Commission has recently called for submissions specifically on the impact of data centres – positive and negative – across the country. That move frames digital infrastructure not as a purely commercial matter, but as a human‐rights‐adjacent issue involving communities, environment and equity, said Lewis.
In other words, South Africa already has the bones of a sophisticated accountability regime. The challenge is implementation.
“ Elections every four or five years bring new officials and, with them, institutional memory loss. Documents go missing. Municipalities – legally mandated to provide water – often lack the capacity to manage authorisations, track who is abstracting what, or maintain clear records of who approved which borehole a decade ago and on what terms.”
For data centre operators, this means internal record‐keeping and traceable decision‐making are not optional niceties: they are survival tools. When the paperwork in the public sector is incomplete or lost, the company’ s own documentation may be the only clear history of how water use was authorised and managed.
WHO CONTROLS THE TAP? The panel drew on experience from Cape Town’ s‘ Day Zero’ scare and the COVID‐19 disaster period. These were live experiments in what happens when water is genuinely scarce and the state is operating under disaster management legislation.
One hard lesson: data centres, as currently classified, are not always treated as‘ essential services’. Unless they demonstrably support
© RACA Journal
28 www. refrigerationandaircon. co. za RACA Journal I October 2026