Nairobi Emerges as East Africa's Digital Infrastructure Powerhouse

Nairobi already accounts for 15 of Kenya's 19 data centres and holds more than 80 percent of the country's data centre power capacity, according to industry tracking. Mombasa serves as the secondary hub, favoured for its subsea cable landing stations connecting East Africa to the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

That concentration of infrastructure is now drawing capital from telcos, colocation operators and private investors at the same time, rather than from any single category of buyer.

Airtel Kenya broke ground on a new Nairobi data centre in early August 2026, targeting commissioning in July 2027. Local media reports have framed the project as a move to compete with Johannesburg and Lagos for regional hub status, and as a challenge to Safaricom's long-standing dominance of Kenyan digital infrastructure.

iXAfrica, one of East and Central Africa's largest hyperscale, carrier-neutral facilities, secured financing from Rand Merchant Bank for a 20 megawatt expansion and has agreed to acquire 11 acres for a second Nairobi campus. The company also partnered with Oracle in January 2026 to host Kenya's first public cloud region, giving local enterprises direct access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without routing through facilities overseas.

Africa Data Centres, part of Cassava Technologies, is building a second Nairobi facility with up to 20 megawatts of capacity and has begun securing land for a third. The company says the investment, exceeding $200 million in total, is aimed at doubling the country's total data centre capacity.

Capital is not limited to telecom operators. A Knight Frank Wealth and Investment Trends Report published in July 2026 found that data centres have become one of the fastest growing asset classes among wealthy Kenyan investors, alongside logistics, as high net worth individuals diversify away from traditional real estate and hospitality holdings.

Knight Frank pointed to the rapid development of fibre connectivity, both subsea and terrestrial, as the single most significant enabler of Africa's data centre expansion.

Kenya's build-out is unfolding alongside a broader industry debate over whether African data centre capacity is outpacing genuine demand. That question is expected to feature at a dedicated session during ITW Africa 2026, where operators including iXAfrica, Open Access Data Centres, Wingu Africa and UniCloudAfrica will examine whether capacity built across the continent over the past two years of heavy construction spending is being matched by real workloads.

Power supply, rather than capital or regulation, has been identified as the defining constraint on African digital infrastructure growth more broadly. Kenya illustrates that dynamic directly. KenGen, the country's dominant power generator, and KETRACO, its transmission operator, are both represented at ITW Africa this year, a sign that Kenya's energy and digital infrastructure sectors are engaging more directly than in previous years.

ITW Africa and Datacloud Africa return to Nairobi from 7 to 10 September 2026, with Airtel, iXAfrica and Africa Data Centres all mid-expansion in the host city as demand, power and financing remain live topics on the agenda.