A 170MW approval is under appeal in Cape Town, and the hearing was closed to the appellants, the public and the press. Boards that lease capacity carry duties under a code in force since January.
The instinct in most boardrooms is to read the Human Rights Commission's data centre inquiry as an operator problem. The operators will answer for their electricity and water, and enterprises that merely rent capacity can watch from a distance. That reading is too comfortable, and not because of environmental politics. It is because of a code in force since January.
What the commission asked
The commission invited written submissions in May, under section 184 of the Constitution, on the human rights implications of data centre expansion. Its themes were wide: electricity demand, water use, environmental impact, e-waste, community consultation and accountability.
Submissions closed on 30 July. The Association for Computing Machinery and the African Centre for Biodiversity filed, and the Climate Justice Coalition followed in August, calling for developments to be halted. No major corporate submission has been reported, so civil society has set the terms.
King V is not coming, it is here
The King V Code was published in late October 2025 and applies to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026, reducing King IV's 17 principles to 13. For most organisations this is the first reporting cycle under it.
It is a code, not a statute, operating on apply-and-explain with practices scaled to size and expected impact. That is a smaller escape than it looks.
The recommended practices are more specific than most directors realise.
Section 76(3)(c) of the Companies Act obliges directors to act with the care and diligence reasonably expected of someone carrying out their functions, and courts assessing that standard look to prevailing codes as the benchmark.
The subject matter is already on the board agenda
The recommended practices are more specific than most directors realise. Principle two asks the governing body to oversee targets covering community development, human rights, climate and energy resilience, water stewardship and waste.
Principle 10 asks it to ensure responsible disposal of obsolete technology. Principle 13 asks it to identify stakeholders affected by the indirect consequences of what it does.
Electricity, water, e-waste, affected communities. The commission invented no new standard. It asked about matters our own code already places before boards.
Where the argument needs care
Principle 10 also asks boards to manage the risks of outsourced technologies, including minimum assurance from the provider over significant risks.
Conventionally that covers availability, security and continuity, and reading it to reach environmental conduct is an interpretation that should be named as one. Proportionality does the rest: a tenant is not a developer, and owes a duty to know what it is buying scaled to what it buys.
Consultation is already law here
Under the National Environmental Management Act, listed activities may not commence without environmental authorisation, and the assessment routes carry public participation requirements.
The process exists but is not always followed in sequence: Africa Data Centres applied under section 24G for retrospective rectification at its Midrand campus after expansion crossed listing thresholds.
The live test is no longer the inquiry
The commission has published nothing since submissions closed, and the sharper test has arrived in a municipal process.
In July, Cape Town's Municipal Planning Tribunal approved a 170MW facility at King Air Industria. The Housing Assembly and Foxglove, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, appealed in August, suspending the approval.
Their objection is not that the project is harmful. It is that the tribunal decided without the information. The appellants cannot establish whether an environmental impact assessment was done at all, a dissenting member recorded that land use rights were granted without electrical profiling, and the application classified the facility as a warehouse containing electronic equipment.
On 12 October, the city's planning appeals advisory panel heard that appeal behind closed doors, with the appellants, the public and the press excluded and the venue undisclosed.
The appellants have never been shown the developer's response to their own appeal, which their attorneys call highly irregular. The panel's reasons will not be published, and the appeal authority has 90 days to decide.
The criticism there is of a municipal process rather than a company's conduct, and the developer says sustainable design is a starting point rather than an afterthought.
The city's deputy mayor has confirmed that revised guidelines are being drafted, which concedes the point more plainly than any objector.
What a board can actually do
The work implied is unglamorous and mostly procurement. A board should be able to obtain consumption figures for the facilities it uses, and establish whether a site holds the authorisations it requires.
Cape Town shows how hard the second can be: if litigants with counsel cannot confirm whether an assessment was done, a tenant working from a sales pack cannot. Where information is withheld, that is not an excuse. It is a specification for the next tender.
None of this challenges the ambition. South Africa hosts most of the continent's digital infrastructure, the economic case is real, and operators point fairly to renewable procurement and closed-loop cooling.
Those measures reduce impact. They do not answer how a site was approved or who was consulted.
What it asked is how those decisions were made. King V has put that question to directors since January, and expects the answer in public. In Cape Town it is being answered in a closed room, on a timeline that may run past the elections.
The question for any board is whether it reads that as somebody else's dispute, or as a description of how its own last technology approval was obtained.
Related reading on ITWeb:
SA data centre operators push back amid sustainability probe
SA has Africa's deepest AI infrastructure but lags on governance
Africa's data centre capacity on back foot, despite investment push
SA emerging as global AI inference powerhouse
AI adoption exposes governance gaps as organisations race to keep up
The three AI stages every leader needs to understand
Sources cited:
SAHRC media advisory calling for submissions on data centres and human rights
Inquiry themes and process — Engineering News
Submission deadline and process — The Citizen
King V Code on Corporate Governance for South Africa 2025 — IoDSA
King V effective date and structure — Clyde & Co
Section 76(3)(c) of the Companies Act and the director standard of care — ECGI
NEMA listed activities, authorisation and public participation — ENS
Section 24G rectification at the Midrand campus — UCT AI Initiative
Climate Justice Coalition submission — MyBroadband
Appeal against Equinix data centre to be heard behind closed doors — Business Day, 12 October 2026
Data centre deal — Cape Town forced back to the drawing board — Daily Maverick, 20 September 2026
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