South African state-owned utility Eskom is courting some of the world’s biggest hyperscale data center firms as it looks for offtakers for excess energy.

According to reporting from the FT, Eskom chair Mteto Nyati said that the utility plans to take advantage of South Africa’s growing AI economy by selling surplus energy on the grid to hyperscalers.

“We are having discussions with the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Googles. We love those discussions because those are power-hungry sectors — that’s exactly what we need right now,” he told the FT.

The strategy has been influenced by a record amount of surplus peak capacity across its system, with the utility reporting that it had approximately 6GW of surplus capacity. The surplus is the biggest reserve margin the utility has had in almost a decade, after years of blackouts across the country.

“We’ve got this power that we cannot sell, that’s the reality of the situation,” Nyati said.

Eskom has been undergoing a period of reform since 2023 to modernize its ailing grid infrastructure. To support this, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Infrastructure South Africa (ISA) to boost investment and accelerate infrastructure development. As part of the MoU, ISA will assist Eskom in developing business cases that align with the utility’s projects. At the same time, Eskom will identify high-impact projects from its development pipeline that need financing.

South Africa is Africa’s largest data center market, with around 70 percent of Africa's installed IT capacity. According to Data Center Map, the country has 63 facilities across 41 operators, with the bulk concentrated in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Notable operators include Teraco, Vantage, Africa Data Centres, and Equinix.

Last month, Equinix secured approval from the Cape Town Municipal Planning Tribunal to rezone a plot of land in Cape Town, where it is planning to develop two data centers.