World
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Johannesburg is becoming one of Africa’s most important data-centre hubs. That is good news for South Africa’s digital economy. But billions in investment should not end the conversation. They should start one: how much electricity, water, land and public infrastructure will these facilities consume — and who ultimately pays?
Johannesburg is fast becoming one of Africa’s digital infrastructure capitals. The city and wider Gauteng region are attracting some of the world’s biggest cloud, technology and infrastructure companies. The reason is straightforward: Johannesburg is South Africa’s commercial and financial centre, with extensive fibre networks, major internet exchange infrastructure and a concentration of banks, telecoms operators, businesses and public institutions that increasingly depend on cloud services. That is an economic opportunity South Africa should welcome.
Data centres underpin digital banking, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, government systems, streaming, cybersecurity and telecommunications. Hosting more computing infrastructure locally can improve resilience, reduce latency and strengthen South Africa’s position as a digital gateway into Africa.
But data centres are not just buildings full of computers. They are large, concentrated infrastructure consumers. They need electricity around the clock. They need high-capacity connections, substations, backup generation and well-serviced land. Depending on how they are designed, they may also require substantial water for cooling.
And AI is raising the stakes.
AI is changing the power equation
The new generation of AI infrastructure packs enormous computing power into increasingly dense facilities. That means more electricity.
Global demand from data centres is expected to rise sharply this decade as cloud computing and AI expand. For Johannesburg, the question is not simply whether South Africa has enough generating capacity today. These facilities may operate for decades. The real test is whether the electricity network — generation, transmission, substations and municipal distribution — can absorb large new users without pushing costs onto everyone else.
If a hyperscale facility requires a new substation, who pays for it? If the surrounding electricity network must be strengthened, does the developer cover the cost or does it eventually appear in tariffs? And if additional generation or storage is needed to support the load, should that form part of the investment obligation?
These are not hypothetical questions. Other countries have already discovered what happens when data-centre expansion runs ahead of infrastructure planning.
Ireland learned the hard way
Ireland enthusiastically attracted the world’s largest technology companies and became a major European data-centre hub. Then electricity demand became impossible to ignore. Data centres grew into a significant part of the country’s power consumption, creating grid pressures and forcing regulators to rethink how new facilities should be connected. Ireland did not reject the industry. It changed the rules.
New developments face greater scrutiny over where they are built, their effect on the grid, whether additional generation or storage accompanies them, and the wider economic value they create. That is the lesson South Africa should absorb early. Once data centres reach a certain scale, they stop being ordinary property developments. They become energy-policy decisions.
Singapore asks: value per megawatt
Singapore went further. With scarce land and limited energy resources, it temporarily constrained data-centre development and later reopened the market more selectively. The crucial shift was philosophical. The question was no longer simply: How much money is being invested? It became: How much economic and strategic value does the country receive for the energy and land being allocated? That is a better question for Johannesburg too.
A billion-rand project sounds impressive. But if it consumes enormous amounts of scarce infrastructure while creating relatively few permanent jobs and importing most of its equipment, the headline number tells only part of the story. Investment should be measured against what remains in the local economy.
Land is not free simply because an investor buys it
Data centres also compete for prime industrial land. The best sites tend to have exactly the infrastructure cities struggle to provide: strong electricity connections, fibre, water, roads and proximity to economic centres. That land has alternatives. It could support manufacturing, logistics, housing or other commercial activity. The Netherlands eventually restricted the location of very large hyperscale facilities partly because government concluded that land and energy were too important to allocate without a wider strategic test.
Johannesburg need not copy the Dutch approach. But it should copy the question: Is this the highest-value use of scarce, infrastructure-rich land?
Then there is water
For Johannesburg, water deserves particular scrutiny. Residents already live with outages, ageing infrastructure, losses and supply constraints. In that environment, the water demands of large new developments cannot be treated as an afterthought.
Not every data centre is a water guzzler. Cooling designs differ significantly. Some use evaporative cooling; others rely on closed-loop or air-cooled systems with far lower water consumption. That is precisely why disclosure matters. For every major facility, the public should know how much water will be required, whether it will be potable water, what cooling technology will be used and what happens during droughts or supply interruptions. A promise that a facility is “water efficient” is not enough. Show the numbers.
What about the jobs?
The same principle should apply to employment. Data centres can create large numbers of jobs during construction. Engineers, electricians, builders, fibre contractors, security companies and equipment suppliers all benefit. But once construction ends, the permanent workforce can be relatively small compared with the billions invested. That does not make the investment undesirable. Data centres can support broader digital ecosystems and create valuable technical jobs. But the numbers should not be blurred.
How many jobs are temporary? How many are permanent? How many are South African? How many apprentices, graduates and technicians will be trained? And how much of the procurement actually goes to local companies rather than imported servers, cooling systems and electrical equipment?
A project should not qualify as transformative simply because the capital expenditure is large. The better question is: How much capability does it leave behind?
South Africa absolutely needs data centres
This is not an argument against the industry. Quite the opposite. South Africa cannot build a serious AI, cloud, fintech or digital-services economy without world-class data-centre infrastructure.
Johannesburg should compete aggressively for that investment. But competing for investment does not mean accepting it on any terms. South Africa should want the most efficient facilities, the strongest skills commitments, the deepest local supply chains and the greatest economic value per megawatt consumed. That is what strategic investment policy looks like.
Publish the numbers
Large data-centre developments should therefore come with a basic public-interest disclosure.
The public-interest checklist
- How much electricity will the facility require?
- How much water?
- What cooling system will it use?
- What new substations, transmission or municipal infrastructure will be required?
- Who will pay for those upgrades?
- How many construction and permanent jobs are expected?
- What are the commitments on local procurement and skills development?
- And, critically, were those promises ultimately delivered?
A national register of major data centres would help too. One project may look manageable on its own. Ten large projects drawing electricity and water from the same constrained system are a different matter. Infrastructure planning must consider the cumulative load.
Follow the infrastructure bill
The most important question may ultimately be the simplest: Who pays?
When a private development requires major public infrastructure, somebody carries the cost. If the investor pays, say so. If a municipality, electricity utility or water provider is expected to contribute, disclose that too. Because there is a real danger in celebrating a R10 billion private investment while quietly socialising part of the infrastructure bill.
Johannesburg already has communities waiting for reliable electricity, water, roads and basic municipal services. Those residents should not unknowingly subsidise infrastructure for some of the world's richest technology companies.
Make public value part of the deal
Johannesburg should want to become Africa’s leading data-centre city. But leadership should mean more than hosting the most servers. It should mean building the continent’s smartest framework for digital infrastructure. Every major project should face a simple test: What does South Africa get for the megawatts, water, land and infrastructure it gives up?
Are local companies gaining business? Are South Africans gaining skills? Are permanent jobs being created? Is new energy capacity being added? Are infrastructure costs being carried fairly? And can the public see the answers? The choice is not between data centres and development.
The real choice is between unmanaged growth and strategic growth. Johannesburg should welcome the investment — but it should negotiate from the position that access to scarce public infrastructure has value. The billions matter. But what South Africa gets in return matters more.
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Africa does not need to be enlarged. It needs to be represented at its proper scale. Washington’s lonely opposition to a better world map exposes how easily an argument about accuracy can become an ideological fight.
On 4 September 2026, 164 countries backed the African-led “Correct the Map” resolution at the UN General Assembly. The United States alone voted against it; six countries abstained. The initiative was led by Togo and the African Union. The UN’s account of the vote records the outcome.
Washington challenged the campaign’s politics without answering its cartographic case. The resolution encourages more accurate representation of continental areas. It does not ban Mercator or impose a single projection on every mapmaker. Its practical proposition is modest: use maps suited to what they are meant to teach.
The familiar Mercator world map inflates high-latitude land relative to equatorial regions. Africa consequently loses visual weight. A navigation tool has become a misleading classroom default. Correcting that mismatch should be straightforward.
The technical case: useful mathematics, wrong assignment
No flat map can preserve every property of a curved Earth. Cartographers must choose among competing priorities: area, angles, distance and direction. “Accurate” therefore needs a second question: accurate for what purpose?
Mercator preserves local angles. On its conventional form, a line of constant compass bearing appears straight—a useful property for navigation. Its failure as a general world-area comparison follows from the same mathematics. The US Geological Survey’s projection guide explains both its navigational value and its severe exaggeration near the poles.
How Mercator distorts size
At 60° north or south, a small patch occupies four times the mapped area of an equally sized equatorial patch. On a spherical Mercator map, local area scale is 1/cos²(latitude), relative to the equator. Distortion grows towards the poles, which cannot be shown.
These are local factors, not multipliers for entire continents. Africa looks relatively smaller because higher-latitude land is enlarged.
The problem is not that Africa has been physically shrunk by the projection. It is that land farther from the equator is inflated in relation to it. The effect also applies in the Southern Hemisphere. That matters: the mathematical rule is latitude, not race, nationality or political allegiance. The political question begins with the decision to keep using that rule for tasks it serves badly.
Equal area does not mean perfect
Equal Earth offers a more suitable starting point when comparing continental areas. Developed by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny in 2018, it preserves relative area while presenting a continuous world map. Its design and properties are set out in the authors’ research paper.
It still distorts shapes, angles and distances. It cannot turn a flat sheet into a globe. That is a trade-off to explain, not a reason to retain an unsuitable default. A classroom comparing land area needs a different tool from a navigator plotting a bearing or a surveyor mapping a small site.
Projection choice also depends on geographic extent. As the USGS notes, a projection that performs badly for a whole-world view can have a related form that works well over a limited region. A sensible reform should therefore target inappropriate world maps, rather than demand the replacement of every technical mapping system.
The political case: who sets the default?
Maps are often encountered before their assumptions are explained. A child sees which places dominate the page. A newsroom chooses the image behind a discussion of world affairs. An institution hangs a map that appears to require no justification because it has always been there.
Repeated visual conventions can make a particular ordering of the world feel natural. Maps do not explain every prejudice or diplomatic imbalance. But institutions can correct misleading comparisons without first proving that a classroom wall map has altered an investment decision.
Calling the campaign merely symbolic misses what public institutions do: they select, authorise and reproduce representations. An African-led challenge to a familiar default is an assertion of agency. Africa is asking to help set the standards through which the world is taught, rather than simply appear inside standards chosen elsewhere.
This argument does not require claiming that Mercator invented his projection to belittle Africa. A technical instrument can acquire a political role through later use. Its original purpose and its subsequent authority are separate questions.
Washington turned a map into an ideological enemy
The United States cast the only vote against the resolution. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine abstained. These were six abstentions, not six additional votes against Africa’s proposal. The reported voting breakdown makes Washington’s isolation unmistakable.
In its explanation, Washington attacked the initiative’s association with reparations and cognitive justice, presenting it as ideological overreach and a distraction from the UN’s serious business. Its objection was political, rather than a mathematical rebuttal of area distortion. The UN meeting transcript records the US explanation.
That is the absurdity: an invitation to choose better maps for a defined educational purpose was treated as a threat to the institution’s credibility. Disliking the political language surrounding a proposal does not establish that its practical recommendation is wrong. Washington could challenge sweeping historical claims while supporting accurate area comparisons. Instead, it voted against the package.
There is also a striking contradiction in dismissing the initiative as too trivial for international attention while treating its ideological implications as serious enough to warrant solitary opposition. If the change is modest, support it on its merits. If representations matter, engage with the case Africans are making. Neither position is served by treating the campaign’s vocabulary as a substitute for assessing its substance.
Six abstentions—and a distinction worth defending
Ukraine and Serbia offered a different objection: political boundaries shown in materials associated with Equal Earth. Both supported the initiative’s basic aim. Ukraine raised the depiction of occupied Ukrainian territory; Serbia cited incompatibility with international legal standards. Their explanations should not be recast as opposition to Africa’s true size. The available explanations reviewed here do not establish individual motives for Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania or Moldova.
Yet abstention was not the only way to register concern. Britain supported the resolution while explicitly rejecting any implication for disputed borders, and Ireland’s statement for the EU separated projection choice from territorial recognition. These distinctions appear in the meeting transcript.
The stronger criticism of the abstentions is therefore practical: why withhold support for better continental proportions when boundary safeguards can be stated separately? Sovereignty concerns deserve serious treatment. But a cartographic equation cannot annex territory; the boundary dataset and its presentation must be challenged on their own terms. Fixing those depictions and supporting equal-area education are compatible positions.
Africa should not have to choose between being drawn at its proper scale and respecting another country’s borders. A competent international response can do both.
Publishers must disclose boundary conventions independently of projection choice. Equal area is not a certificate of political neutrality: a mathematically sound map can still carry misleading borders or labels.
Representation must lead to implementation
A resolution is an opening, not a completed reform. Education ministries should review world maps in textbooks and procurement standards. Teachers should compare a globe, Mercator and an equal-area map, showing what each preserves and sacrifices. Newsrooms should identify projections when area comparisons matter.
Digital publishers should offer appropriate world views and explain their choices. Existing tools already support Equal Earth, including the PROJ cartographic software library. Implementation is therefore a practical publishing and design task, not a demand for undiscovered technology.
African governments should also invest in the less photogenic foundations of geographic authority: reliable public datasets, surveying, mapping skills and accessible geographic information. A corrected wall map cannot compensate for missing local data or weak institutions.
Correct the map—and keep the ambition proportionate
Africa’s entitlement to fair treatment does not depend on its landmass. Small countries deserve representation too. Nor will a new projection rewrite trade agreements, build infrastructure or redistribute voting power.
But those limits are no defence of avoidable distortion. Correcting a map is a modest, achievable improvement in public knowledge. Its political strength lies in pairing that practical change with a larger principle: familiar representations should remain open to challenge.
An equal-area map will not redistribute global power. But Africa should not have to win a diplomatic argument to be represented at its actual size. Correct the map. Then teach readers what every map leaves out.