South Africa’s Nationwide Treasury plans to speed up information centre progress and strengthen the nation’s place as a digital infrastructure hub for the continent.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana stated the federal government now views information infrastructure as important to the financial system, evaluating it to electrical energy, ports, and transport networks.
“The usage of information and synthetic intelligence has turn out to be vital for the long run improvement of economies worldwide,” Godongwana stated in his 2026 price range speech on Wednesday. “Knowledge infrastructure ought to be thought of as vital as electrical energy, ports and transport networks.”
The minister added that the Nationwide Treasury would discover choices to assist information centres and associated infrastructure increase, reinforcing South Africa’s function as a regional hub for cloud and AI applied sciences.
The transfer comes as governments around the globe pour capital into AI-era infrastructure. Greater than $1 trillion is predicted to be invested into hyperscale and data-centre capability globally by 2027, with trillions extra possible by 2030. South Africa is positioning itself to seize a significant share of that progress.
The nation already hosts over 50 working information centres and has a mixed funding pipeline price roughly R50 billion (about $2.7 billion) over the subsequent three years, concentrated round Johannesburg and Cape City.
Microsoft has dedicated an extra R5.4 billion ($340 million) to increase its AI-ready capability, including to its earlier R20 billion ($1.1 billion) Azure spend. Google has launched its first African cloud area in Johannesburg, whereas Amazon Net Companies continues to scale its Cape City hyperscale area.
Teraco is constructing 4 new services backed by virtually $900 million, and Vantage Knowledge Centres is investing about $1 billion in a brand new campus at Waterfall in Midrand.
On the centre of this build-out sits Teraco’s Isando campus, which runs at an IT load of roughly 70 megawatts. Though small in contrast with the gigawatt-scale AI campuses rising in the USA, Isando stays the biggest data-centre advanced on the African continent.
After years of speedy greenfield improvement, South Africa’s data-centre sector is getting into a brand new section of consolidation. Open Entry Knowledge Centres, a subsidiary of the WIOCC Group, not too long ago acquired seven NTT Knowledge services, an early signal of a race for scale and regional footprint. Hyperscale suppliers now want bigger, standardised companions able to delivering constant efficiency throughout a number of geographies.
Whereas the Nationwide Treasury has not formally categorised information centres as “vital infrastructure” below the Crucial Infrastructure Safety Act, its new language locations them alongside power and manufacturing in coverage discussions, marking a transparent shift in how the federal government views their financial significance.
This might open the door to a set of incentives that might embody decrease tax charges for qualifying investments, accelerated depreciation for plant and gear, value-added tax reduction for imported servers and energy gear, and sooner grid connections supported by renewable power wheeling.
Of those potential measures, electrical energy entry stays an important. Business executives level out that offer constraints proceed to restrict progress and lift working prices, making dependable and inexpensive energy the decisive consider future data-centre growth.
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