Liquid Intelligent Technologies Kenya says the continent's data-centre capacity is becoming a major concern for African telecom executives, as the Cassava Technologies-owned operator pushes deeper into AI and cloud services.
Africa accounts for just 0.6% of the world's data-centre capacity, Liquid Kenya Vice President and CEO Neeraj Pradhan told ITWeb Africa, adding that cross-border connectivity was the only other issue that came close to matching it as a concern among industry leaders.
The comments come as Liquid expands beyond its traditional role as a connectivity provider, adding AI, cloud and cyber security services to its fibre backbone.
"Connectivity becomes the foundation of the digital infrastructure. Going forward, that is going to be the base," said Pradhan. "If you have a foundation, you should build a good house on it, and that's what we are trying to do."
Pradhan pointed to an earlier East Coast submarine cable cut, which knocked seven to eight countries offline for an extended period, as evidence of why African data needs to be processed and stored closer to home.
"People could not access their own data," he said, recalling repeated system checks during the disruption.
He argued that routing AI workloads through regional data hubs, rather than sending them via submarine cable to other continents, would reduce pressure on subsea capacity.
Undersea cable repairs have historically taken between a week and 20 days, he said, compared with terrestrial fibre upgrades, which he called "easier and cheaper" to fix.
To strengthen resilience along one of its busiest corridors, Liquid has added a third route between Mombasa and the Uganda border, supplementing its existing two-route redundancy as traffic grows. The Mombasa corridor provides connectivity into several East African markets, including landlocked countries.
Liquid's East African network, spanning Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan, forms part of a wider 116,000km fibre network across Africa. Pradhan said further build-out decisions are now driven by usage patterns rather than speculative expansion.
"Gone are those days where you will build in anticipation," he said, adding that AI-driven consumption, alongside cloud, would define the next wave of network demand.
On the AI infrastructure front, Cassava Technologies, Liquid's parent company, has expanded its GPU-as-a-service offering in Africa, using NVIDIA infrastructure to support local AI workloads.
"The closer we bring infrastructure, the better user experience it is. And it allows a lot of start-ups also to be very competitive," he said.
Cassava is deploying its NVIDIA-powered AI Factory in South Africa and has announced plans to expand to Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco. It announced Egypt's first national AI Factory through a partnership with Vodafone Business this week.
Pradhan named AI as Liquid's primary focus for 2027, but flagged data quality, rather than connectivity, as the technology's biggest remaining obstacle.
He said return on investment from AI remains difficult to measure without clearly defined, business-specific use cases, an approach Liquid says it has spent nearly two years testing internally before taking it to market.
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