New Lenovo research, alongside visionary designs from Mamou-Mani and AKT II, shows how data centres need to evolve to meet South Africa's urgent computing and climate challenges.
As South Africa’s digital economy accelerates, traditional data centre infrastructure is increasingly regarded as inadequate to meet the demands of AI growth, data sovereignty, and sustainability. Local market data shows rapid infrastructure expansion, but rising energy constraints and cooling challenges are compelling organisations to rethink how they build and scale digital infrastructure.
Data centre design needs to evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA, new research commissioned by Lenovo reveals. From powering AI workloads efficiently to meeting urgent sustainability and compliance demands, traditional data centre designs are falling short, with nearly half (46%) of IT leaders admitting their current infrastructure does not support energy or carbon-reduction goals.
At the same time, an overwhelming 99% of IT and C-level decision-makers in the region believe data sovereignty will be important, a sentiment that resonates deeply within our borders, driven by stringent regulatory frameworks like POPIA and how data is collected, stored, and processed in the coming years. And while AI continues to accelerate data usage across industries, many organisations are still struggling to implement the technology effectively or sustain its powering, highlighting the growing gap between digital ambition and infrastructure reality.
Lenovo conducted the Data Centre of the Future study, in partnership with Opinium, to create a blueprint outlining the key factors affecting the future design, technology, and location of data centres. It arrives as the data centre market expands, and energy consumption, sustainability, and costs become vital considerations for IT decision-makers in EMEA.
SA Market Dynamics: Surge in Data Centre Demand
SA has become Africa's leading data centre hub, driven by enterprise digital transformation, hyperscale cloud expansion, and sovereign data demand. According to Mordor Intelligence, the data centre market is expected to grow from approximately USD 0.58 billion in 2025 to USD 1.25 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of around 16.6%. Johannesburg continues to be the dominant hub, while Cape Town and Durban attract increasing investment.
The colocation segment was valued at USD 410 million in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 843 million by 2030, indicating strong demand from enterprises, hyperscalers, and digital services. SA operates around 69 data centre facilities, with more planned, supporting finance, telecom, cloud, and AI services.
These figures confirm that SA is the digital gateway for enterprise, cloud, and AI services in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Power & Sustainability: A Core Constraint for Future Growth
One of South Africa's most urgent structural issues remains power reliability and sustainability, a factor highly relevant to future data centre design. The country’s electricity grid faces frequent outages and load shedding, prompting data centre operators to seek alternatives beyond the national grid for a dependable power supply.
Large hyperscale and AI-ready data centres can require 20–100 MW or more, comparable to supplying power to tens of thousands of households, placing significant pressure on an already strained grid. Alternative energy initiatives are emerging, such as Africa Data Centres’ 12 MW solar farm project to power its Cape Town and Johannesburg operations, a sign that renewable generation will be central to future capacity.
Embedding the Lenovo EMEA Findings in the SA Context
Recent research commissioned by Lenovo and Opinium across EMEA, although not specific to South Africa, highlights several themes that strongly resonate with South Africa’s market realities.
Sustainability Readiness Gap
Lenovo’s findings reveal that 92% of IT decision-makers expect partners to lower energy use and carbon footprint, yet only 46% feel their current data centres support sustainability targets.
In South Australia, that gap is even more severe. With grid instability and an urgent push towards renewable energy mandates, South Australian data centre operators must prioritise energy-efficient designs and renewable generation. This aligns with the government’s National Policy on Cloud and Data, which encourages off-grid power solutions to reduce pressure on the grid.
Data Sovereignty & Latency
The Lenovo study highlights that 99% of EMEA IT leaders consider data sovereignty crucial. In South Africa, local hosting is a strategic requirement for compliance in regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, and public services. Recent investments by Visa, aimed explicitly at reducing reliance on overseas infrastructure, emphasise this trend for South Africa.
AI’s Impact on Data Usage & Readiness
Lenovo reports that 90% of IT leaders expect AI to significantly increase data volumes, but only 41% are confident in their preparedness. This trend is evident in the country, where the AI data centre market is anticipated to expand through skills programmes and cloud investments, yet infrastructure continues to face energy and cooling bottlenecks.
Market Imperatives for SA’s Data Centre Future
Energy and cooling innovation has become vital for South Africa’s data centre future, as traditional air-cooled designs increasingly struggle to support high-density compute and AI workloads. This is leading to a shift towards liquid cooling, hybrid power systems, and more energy-efficient architectures as key competitive advantages. At the same time, grid resilience remains a crucial challenge, requiring data centre operators to innovate around national grid limitations through on-site renewables, microgrids, and battery storage to ensure uptime and sustainability.
To support this transformation, skills development and infrastructure policies must align, with national and private-sector partnerships accelerating the upskilling of professionals in AI, cloud, and infrastructure engineering to manage more complex, energy-intensive environments. Finally, sovereign data and cloud compliance are boosting local capacity building, as regulatory expectations around data residency, latency, and security increasingly favour domestic infrastructure over offshore hosting—a trend highlighted in SA's evolving cloud and data centre policy landscape.
Technologies such as liquid cooling, renewable power generation, and intelligent energy optimisation, as highlighted in the Lenovo research, will now be vital components of future-ready infrastructure.
