Equinix’s plans to build two data centers in Cape Town, South Africa, are closer to completion after the Cape Town Municipal Planning Tribunal gave approval for the rezoning of an approximately 37-acre land parcel near the city’s airport.

The company intends to build both facilities in King Air Industrial, a logistics and industrial hub on Pallotti Road.

The company has already acquired zoning approval for the first data center, which will take up around 50,000 sqm (538,195 sq ft) of space, but previously had not secured zoning approval for a second 72,542 sqm (780,835 sq ft) data center.

This is because the King Air Industrial hub had allocated its land across four different land use categories. Data centers are included under one of those categories – General Industry – but they do not have their own use category, and the construction of Equinix’s second data center would require the re-allocation of land from other use categories to a newly created ‘data center’ category.

It is these two changes – the creation of a new data center category, and the re-allocation of land from other use categories to the new data center category – that were approved by the Municipal Planning Tribunal on Tuesday, 14 July.

But Equinix says that it has yet to submit an actual application for a data center at the Cape Town site.

"If we do submit for planning, we are committed to being fully transparent and will provide detailed information to all relevant stakeholders in a timely manner," an Equinix representative told DCD.

Opposition to the data center has been mounting.

Earlier in April, UK non-profit Foxglove and the South African organization Housing Assembly were the only organizations to co-submit the sole objection to the Municipal Planning Tribunal, saying that there was not enough information about the data center’s water use, emissions, electricity demand, generation, pollution, noise, and more.

IOL has reported that several locals turned up to protest the Tribunal’s decision yesterday, and online reaction to the Tribunal’s decision has been largely negative.

Equinix has one other data center facility in the country, located in Johannesburg.