South Africa’s infrastructure investment will total $582 billion over the next 25 years, with transport, resources and power accounting for 63% of the spend, according to a long-term outlook from PwC.
The PwC Global Infrastructure Outlook 2025 to 2050, released on 20 May 2026, projects that South Africa’s annual infrastructure spending will grow by 39% from $19 billion in 2024 to $26 billion by 2050. The analysis is the firm’s forecast for the first quarter of the century across nine sectors, 20 subsectors, and 45 countries.
Where the $582 billion goes
Transport infrastructure is the largest sector at $155 billion (27% of the total). The resources infrastructure follows at $128 billion. Power infrastructure adds $83 billion. Together, the three sectors account for 63% of South Africa’s projected spend through 2050.
Power, transport and digital converge
PwC’s central thesis is that traditional infrastructure categories are blurring as artificial intelligence, electrification and urbanisation push the systems together. Power, transport and digital infrastructure are increasingly being built as connected, digitally enabled networks rather than as separate categories of assets.
“The scale of infrastructure investment needed over the next 25 years has the potential to take infrastructure beyond just an assemblage of roads, railway lines, pipes, power lines and concrete structures to a fundamentally transformed ecosystem: smarter, more resilient, and interconnected across physical, digital, environmental, and social systems,” said Jarendra Reddy, infrastructure leader at PwC South Africa.
Reddy added that this transition “won’t be automatic” and would require “ingenuity, smart prioritisation of resources, exceptional public and private sector collaboration and acceleration of the institutional reforms in progress”.
Africa’s highest growth rate, lowest base
Africa, as a continent, has the smallest annual investment levels of any region in the outlook but the highest forecast growth rate at 77%. Annual African infrastructure spending is expected to rise from around $54 billion today to $96 billion by 2050.
Globally, annual infrastructure spending is forecast to climb from $4.4 trillion in 2024 to $6.9 trillion in 2050, driving cumulative global investment of $151.1 trillion. The Asia-Pacific region alone is projected to account for more than half of that global total, as urbanisation and technological expansion drive growth across the transport, digital, and power sectors.
