The multi-tranche funding package of iXAfrica Data Centre, provided last week by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), demonstrates the push by Kenya to become a major digital player on the African continent, and the East African hub for digital infrastructure.
The financing from RMB will allow iXAfrica to fast-track a further 20MW of IT capacity to its Nairobi One (NBOX1) datacentre campus to expand beyond the 2.25MW currently in use.
IXAfrica launched the region’s first hyperscale, AI-ready datacentre in July 2024.
With a total 22.5MW of capacity set to come online at the NBOX1 campus, the company says it has the largest data centre project in the greater East African region.
“Closing this financing with RMB secures our next phase of growth and positions us to welcome more hyperscale and AI customers. We remain committed to expanding our East African footprint and deepening our investment in Kenya,” said Guy Willner, chair, iXAfrica.
In November 2023, iXAfrica announced plans to build a second data centre NBOX2, with 53MW IT power, in Tilisi, a mixed used development area, 30 kms from Nairobi’s CBD.
The move comes as international hyperscale cloud providers look to expand across the continent, and meet growing demand for cloud, AI and enterprise digital services.
Currently South Africa is the largest data centre market on the continent, with global cloud providers such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud and Huawei all having a presence there. Datacentermap.com says there are 56 datacentres in the country. The same source notes that Kenya and Nigeria both have 19 datacentres. And in Kenya, the majority (15) are located in Nairobi, with four in Mombasa.
In January 2024, Oracle announced its intention to open a cloud region in Kenya. While in May 2024, Microsoft, in partnership with G42, announced they were investing $1 billion into the East African country and are set to build a 100MW facility over 24 months.
According to Ken Research, Icolo.io, backed by global datacentre firm Digital Realty, is the dominant datacentre facilities player in Kenya, and accounts for 37.5% of total datacentres. The research company ranks iXAfrica as a ‘fast-growing challenger’ that holds 12.5% of the country's datacentres but leads in the amount of available capacity (55.4%).
Kenya’s push to become a major continental force in digital aligns with its Vision 2030 development agenda, which the government has used to set the agenda to transform the country into a middle-income, knowledge-based economy by the end of the decade. The country is a landing point for eight operational subsea cables, including SEACOM, 2Africa, PEACE and Africa1.
According to a research report released last week by Nigerian firm Heirs Technologies, despite the recent progress, Africa accounts for less than one percent of global datacentre capacity and just half a percent of the international cloud market.
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