Johannesburg and Cape Town are now the two African metros where data centres outrank every other construction sector in growth terms, according to Turner & Townsend’s latest Global Construction Market Intelligence report.
But the more consequential number in that report isn’t about server halls at all — it’s that 87% of the 112 markets surveyed globally are reporting shortages in mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) trades, the exact disciplines a data centre depends on more heavily than almost any other building type.
South Africa is not an exception to that shortage. It is walking into it.
A Pipeline Measured in Megawatts, Built by a Workforce Measured in Deficit
The scale of what’s being built is no longer speculative. Teraco, South Africa’s largest colocation operator, has expanded its national platform to roughly 189 MW of critical IT load across its Isando, Bredell, Cape Town and Durban campuses, with an internal target of 500 MW that includes 290 MW of new Johannesburg capacity and 60 MW more in Cape Town.
Vantage Data Centers has entered the market through a 50:50 joint venture with property developer Attacq to build an 80 MW campus in Johannesburg.
Johannesburg newcomer Cavaleros Group has announced two projects alone — a 360 MW campus in Cape Town and a 200 MW campus at Kosmosdal/Samrand — reportedly linked to Microsoft’s expansion plans.
Layer in NVIDIA’s $700-million partnership with Cassava Technologies to build AI-ready facilities across Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco, and the picture is unambiguous: South Africa alone is on course to add close to 1,000 MW of new data-centre demand to a grid that is already capacity-constrained.
Every one of those megawatts has to be terminated, switched, backed up, cooled and commissioned by people — not by capital. And that is where the story stops being about technology.
| 87% of construction markets globally are reporting MEP trade shortages — the disciplines data centres depend on most (Turner & Townsend, 2026). |
Why a Data Centre Eats Trades Labour Differently Than an Office Block
A commercial office building is, in MEP terms, a relatively forgiving structure — conventional HVAC, standard switchgear, a single-digit number of electrical rooms.
A hyperscale data hall is not. Teraco’s newly expanded JB4 facility in Ekurhuleni runs six data halls each individually rated at 5 MW of critical IT load, built on liquid-to-liquid cooling systems that support both air-cooled cloud racks and direct-to-chip cooling for dense AI workloads.
That is a fundamentally different trade skill-set: instrumentation technicians who understand closed-loop chilled-water systems, electricians certified on high-density switchgear and UPS topologies, and commissioning specialists who can validate N+1 or 2N redundancy before a single server goes live.
This is mission-critical construction, where a single miswired busbar or an uncommissioned cooling loop doesn’t just delay a project — it can take an entire hyperscale tenant’s infrastructure offline.
“CT2’s expansion underscores our continued commitment to meeting the demand for large, hyperscale infrastructure in Africa.”
— Jan Hnizdo, CEO, Teraco
Hnizdo’s confidence in the infrastructure is well-earned — Teraco’s facilities are ISO-certified across nine separate standards.
What’s far less certain is whether the labour market underneath that infrastructure can scale at the same pace as the megawatts.
A Shortage That Predates the AI Boom — and Was Never Fixed
South Africa’s artisan shortage is not a new phenomenon accelerated by AI; it is a structural problem AI demand has simply walked into.
The government launched its ‘Decade of the Artisan’ initiative back in 2014, explicitly identifying electricians, boilermakers, plumbers, riggers and millwrights as trades in critical shortage.
More than a decade later, the Department of Higher Education and Training still lists many of the same trades as priority-shortage occupations.
A peer-reviewed study of the Eastern Cape’s electrical trade, published in a construction-sector journal, found that inadequate training capacity and low industry awareness of the trade were pushing an increasing number of unqualified electricians into the market — a direct erosion of the industry standards a data-centre commissioning process depends on.
The Electrical Contractors’ Association of South Africa points to an ageing qualified workforce, regulatory complexity and the simultaneous pull of renewable-energy and EV-charging infrastructure work as compounding factors.
In other words, the same electricians a data-centre contractor needs for switchgear commissioning are also being pulled toward solar PV installations, battery storage projects and EV infrastructure — sectors expanding for entirely separate reasons but drawing from the identical, static pool of certified tradespeople.
What’s Actually at Risk
The consequence of this gap isn’t an abstract macroeconomic drag — it shows up directly on hyperscale build programmes in three ways.
First, commissioning delays: mission-critical MEP systems require certified sign-off before a facility can accept live tenant load, and a shortage of qualified commissioning engineers directly extends time-to-revenue for operators who have already committed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital.
Second, redundancy and safety risk: data centres run on N+1 or 2N electrical and cooling redundancy specifically to survive a single point of failure, but redundant systems only protect against failure if every leg was installed and tested to the same standard — inconsistent trade quality quietly erodes the resilience the redundancy was built to guarantee.
Third, cost inflation that radiates outward: Africa is projected to record the highest construction cost inflation in the world in 2027, and a shortage-driven wage spiral in Johannesburg and Cape Town’s MEP trades doesn’t stay contained to data-centre projects — it pulls cost and labour away from the housing, road and rail projects competing for the same certified electricians and instrumentation technicians in the same two metros.
The Fix Nobody’s Funding at Pace
Programmes do exist. Artisan Recognition of Prior Learning schemes are converting experienced but uncertified workers into recognised tradespeople, and private operators including Imerys and several TVET-linked SETAs have opened new electrical learnerships through 2026.
But these programmes are producing certified artisans in the dozens and low hundreds at a time, against a data-centre pipeline measured in hundreds of megawatts and years of build-out.
The mismatch in scale is the actual story here — not whether Africa’s AI ambitions are real, but whether the continent is training tradespeople anywhere near the rate its hyperscale pipeline is being permitted and financed.
Africa’s data-centre boom is not going to be decided by GPU allocation or power-purchase agreements alone.
It is going to be decided, quite literally, by whether there are enough qualified hands to wire, cool and commission what’s already been announced.
Also Read
Inside the ISFF: What South Africa’s New Construction Mafia Framework Actually Requires
Lobito Corridor Rail Project Moves to Construction as AFC Secures $753m Financial Close
