Power is the constraint, not the pitch
Where generation and grid reliability decide which announced capacity actually gets built.
Announced capacity keeps outrunning firm power. The markets moving up the index this month are the ones pairing new load with contracted supply rather than with headline megawatts. Here is what moved, market by market.
Market by market
- 24 Jul 2026
Cape Town approves two hyperscale data centres totalling ~174MW
The City of Cape Town has cleared two hyperscale campuses drawing roughly 174MW combined, among the largest new individual loads on the African grid. The approvals land against McKinsey projections that continental installed capacity grows from about 0.4GW today to 1.5–2.2GW by 2030, needing an estimated $10–20bn of investment.
Read the full story at iAfrica → - 22 Jul 2026
South Africa's data centre 'gold rush' risks resource crunch
South Africa hosts about 70% of Africa’s data centres and has drawn commitments from Microsoft and Amazon, with the market expected to roughly double to $5bn by 2031. Reuters reports the build-out is colliding with the country’s electricity and water constraints, raising the question of whether new load competes with households already exposed to outages and drought.
Read the full story at Engineering News (Reuters) →
- 7 Jul 2026
Gabon inaugurates its first Tier III data centre
ST Digital opened a sovereign Tier III facility in the Nkok Special Economic Zone near Libreville, with about 1MW of power, 92 racks and capacity for roughly 3,000 servers, on an investment of 8bn CFA francs. Around 95% of data generated in Gabon has been hosted abroad, and the ICT ministry signed an MoU giving startups discounted access.
Read the full story at Developing Telecoms →