Nairobi already accounts for 15 of Kenya’s 19 data centres, and holds over 80% of the country’s data centre power capacity, according to industry tracking. Mombasa is the secondary hub, favoured for its subsea cable landing stations connecting East Africa to the Middle East, Europe and Asia. That concentration is now attracting capital from telcos, colocation operators and private investors simultaneously, rather than any single category of buyer.
The build-out
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 20MW 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 20MW of capacity and has begun securing land for a third. The company says the investment, more than $200m in total, is aimed at doubling the country’s total data centre capacity.
Capital is not limited to operators. A Knight Frank Wealth & Investment Trends Report published in July 2026 found that data centres have become one of the fastest-growing asset classes for 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.
The unanswered question
Kenya’s build-out is not happening in isolation from a broader debate about whether African data centre capacity is outpacing genuine demand. That question sits at the centre of a dedicated session at ITW Africa 2026, where iXAfrica, Open Access Data Centres, Wingu Africa and UniCloudAfrica will test whether the capacity already built across the continent is being matched by real workloads, after two years of heavy construction spending.
Kenya’s growth also runs into the constraint Capacity has tracked across the wider continent: power, not capital or regulation, as the defining bottleneck on African digital infrastructure. Kenya offers a direct illustration. 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.
What to watch in Nairobi
Kenya’s data centre sector, along with the rest of the continent’s, will be under direct scrutiny when 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, and demand, power and financing all live topics on the agenda, Nairobi is positioned as both the subject and the setting of the conversation this year.
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