IXAfrica has broken ground on an 18MW data center in Nairobi, Kenya. Speaking during the ground breaking ceremony, IXAfrica chairman Guy Willner said that the data center will be IXAfrica’s first after years of delays and is on track to be East Africa’s largest ‘hyperscale-ready’ campus.
The company hopes to build out the campus to 42.5MW of IT load in the coming years, developing on adjacent plots to the 17,000 sq m (183,000 sq ft) site. The company working on building a Nairobi data center for more than two years and construction was expected to begin imminently but hit delays.
“It took a long time to evaluate the market and get investment and then about three years to find a clean and appropriate piece of land. Emerging markets require patience. We are now evaluating sustainability solutions, including cool wall technology, solar, and a number of city initiatives,” Willner explained.
Data centre expansion across Africa
The facility was designed in collaboration with architect firm Future-Tech. It will feature on-campus offices for new businesses and hopes to win the custom of enterprises, governments, and hyperscalers. Demand for cloud services is set to drive further data centre expansion across Africa, with spending predicted to grow in 2022 according to the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in South Africa. According to Jan Hnizdo, MD of Teraco, South Africa leads the continent with 59 data centres, followed by Nigeria and Kenya with 10 each.
“We expect to see strong demand for hosting capacity in data centres across the continent. Key hubs, including South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, are well positioned to be regional growth centres, but investors need clear guidance in these economies that can function very differently from Western markets,” said Jan Hnizdo.
